DJ Shadow

This clip from a 2008 Crate Kings article talks about how DJ Shadow ditched the Akai MPC 60 and MPC 3000 as his main production tools. Shadow said:

"At the time, in 2002, I felt as though ‘The Private Press’ was the best record I could ever make on the MPC, and I was eager for a change. It was also important to me that I not get stagnant and start repeating things I had done in the past. So I switched it up and forced myself to "go back to school," in a sense. I felt that if I refused to rely on the MPC and learn new techniques my music would change, for better or worse, and change was what I craved most."

The MXR Pitch Transposer. It was something that Mario Caldato Jr. from the Beastie Boys introduced me to. That's one of the few pieces of outboard gear that I've ever sought out and bought. I used it a lot during my DJ set when I was touring Europe with Radiohead.

”Endtroducing was recorded to ADAT because that was all that we could afford back then.”

DJ Shadow uses the Akai Professional APC40 MKII during his live performances, as shown in a user-uploaded photo.

*The other important piece of gear in Shadow's setup is a Roland VP-9000, which he uses for its time-stretching and internal effects to morph a mediocre sound into a great one. * “What the drums on ‘Walkie Talkie’ are now and what they were on the record are totally different,” he says. “On the original record, it's just sort of average-sounding, and it actually isn't even a drum break. It just goes, pssssshhh, kuh-boom-boom, and then the vocalists start singing again. So I took that, put it into the MPC, made a fake pattern, put that into the VP, gave it all this huge weight and distortion with the internal effects, plugged it back into the MPC, re-chopped it and made it sound completely different.”

• 2002

Mentioned in this October 2017 Sound on Sound interview.

Davis’ trusty old MPC60, though, is sadly long gone from his setup. Over successive DJ Shadow albums, however, he has progressed through variations on it: upgrading to an MPC2000 for his production of Unkle’s 1998 album Psyence Fiction, then MIDI’ing two of them together for the second DJ Shadow album The Private Press, released in 2002.

“I basically had nearly unlimited sample power and chop power,” he says. “But after The Private Press, I felt like it was important to switch things up. I had purchased Pro Tools so I was fully up and running on that. There’s probably two or three songs on [2006’s] The Outsider where the initial ideas or sketches were done on an MPC. It’s been I’d say 13, 14 years since I used one.

“I will say though that in I think about 2008, I got whatever was new at that time [the MPC5000], thinking, ‘Oh I kinda miss it, let me see what the new version’s like.’ But I just couldn’t go back. It seemed a bit silly to me, knowing what was possible within stuff like Maschine. Once you go into the software synth world, it’s really hard to legitimise going back into the box.”

It is also mentioned in this October 17, 2016 Music Radar interview.

"After that, I went to Pro Tools. I always feel like it's important to break out of your comfort zone a little bit, but I'll say that Ableton Live is the most intuitive music-making program I've used since the MPC - much more so than Pro Tools or Maschine, but that might just be the way my brain works.