1 Figure 1: Pete Rock playing the MPC There are no secrets about the production and playing strategies of the instrument that Pete Rock uses. It is a standard in new school hip-hop beat-making that goes back to the first widely available digital drum machines of the 1980s, the SP1200 (Sampling Percussion 1987) and the MPC60 (MIDI Production Center, 1988). But of course, as soon as it comes to the historical originals - as with classical instruments (e.g. the 'Stradivarius'!) - myths exist about the nature of the hardware and the sound characteristics associated with it. While the SP1200 became a legend with its special 12bit- sound, the MPC became famous for its special timing and created a new instrument interface that competes since then in the area of sampling with the traditional chromatic keyboard-controller. Its 4x4-pad matrix renounces the representation of tonal structures from the beginning, even if it is possible to play melodies with the pads. Developed by Drum Machine pioneer Roger Linn, it does not provide piano keys, but mini-drumpads for fingers. Samples are freely assignable to the pads, be it samples from percussion or melody instruments, be it looped breakbeats. As with any sampler, it is possible to transpose everything on the fly while the tempo of the sample to be played is being modified. Complete chords or motives, hooklines etc. can be tonal adapted to a new context or even 1 Video Pete Rock On The MPC. The machine in the video is an Akai MPC2000XL. Please note that this is a preview that can be different to the final published version PREVIEW Großmann, Rolf: "The Instrument." In: Holger Schulze (Ed.): The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Anthropology. New York (will be published Winter 2020). Rolf Großmann The Instrument The 4x4 matrix When the hip-hop legend Pete Rock demonstrates one of his favorite instruments, the MPC 1 , it seems as if a magician produces a big hit by a simple touch of his fingertips. But ‘the instrument’ does not look very magical, it looks more like a specialized office machine than a traditional musical instrument with strings or keys. There is a 4x4-rubberpad-matrix, a number pad, knobs, button rows, a slider and a small display. And indeed it has a quite bureaucratic function, it accesses an archive and rearranges and transforms parts of it. In this case it is not located in an office and handles an archive of invoices and contracts, but in a music studio and the archives are record crates of parents and friends. For example one of the two songs from the video presentation, “Love is a Battlefield”, is transformed from a long outdated hit of the early 1980s (Pat Benatar, 1983) into a hip-hop track with a new sound, new structure and new vocals (C.L. Smooth, 2007. Prod. Pete Rock; CD “The Outsider”).