Le Tigre – Feminist Sweepstakes

The MPC 60 came into our lives after we finished our first record and had to figure out how to play our songs on tour. We felt like bringing our old sequencer and drum machine on tour was stupid — too fragile. We wanted something that saved to disk. The MPC (MIDI Production Center) is a sampling drum machine (you sample your own sounds and assign them to these cool big pads) that can also play other electronic instruments via MIDI -- it is a sampler, drum machine and sequencer all in one. With the 3.0 system software upgrade and SCSI interface (so we can save data to a zip disk) available from Roger Linn’s website, we souped up the MPC 60 so it was no longer functioning like a thing of the eighties (although it still does not have nearly as much sample time as the more recent MPC 2000, 200XL or 3000). Although it ultimately became this central creative tool for us (we made all the beats on "Feminist Sweepstakes" with it including guitar samples, bass-lines, synthy parts etc), I learned the basics of how to use it in one mind-bending 3-day weekend when I sampled all the drum sounds from the HR-16B onto the MPC and replicated all our old beats and song structures on it. Then I re-sequenced all the MIRAGE loops so that the MMT-8 was out of the picture too . . . it was a pain in the ass. But in the process of doing all this reprogramming shit I discovered this whole world of stuff that I could be doing instead. I can’t tell you how much I treasure the MPC now. It’s like a friend or an arm . . . it doesn’t seem like a piece of equipment, but like a very special robot with human qualities and idiosyncracies capable of making artistic suggestions. I really really love it.