For the love of samples: Phil Weeks and the MPC3000

Phil Weeks knows a catchy sample when he sees it. Having spearheaded his legendary Robsoul imprint for nearly fifteen years, he's rightly mentioned in the same breath as the likes of DJ Sneak and Derrick Carter, but some would argue that his output as a producer trumps all of them.

Ahead of his gig for Magna Carta at Sankeys Ibiza in September, he talks to Mike Boorman about the love of his life, the legendary Akai MPC3000 sampler. 

I'm hope you don't mind me saying this but you are all about samples. I seem to remember reading somewhere that you made an entire album on an MPC3000... is this true?

I do so much with samples - you're right - but I can use the 909 and 303 drum machines, and I do have a keyboard but yes, it's mostly samples.

Two albums I made, the MPC is basically 90% of them. I sequence everything with it, never Logic or Ableton or whatever. All my grooves are from the MPC.

That is old school! Sequencing everything from an MPC. How long have you done it like this for? From the beginning?

All my life. I started with an old Yamaha sampler in 1998 - I ended up having about fourteen lying around my house, but I moved onto an MPC3000 in 2010. I don't really like using computers. I can use Cubase though, but I normally only use that to cut long vocals because the memory for the MPC isn't big enough. But I sync Cubase with the MPC.

I was going to ask you later actually… what do you use to load in samples to the MPC? I know they originally came with a three-and-a-half-inch floppy drive as standard but surely you can't fit much on that?

I work with zip disk.

Ah hah, yeah, I remember those! 100MB, right?

Yeah. And on one zip disk I can fit five or six tracks. I never really have one track that's more than 25MB (to think that zip disks had an integral part in this peak-time stomper below).

Wow, that's quite a different world to the world I'm in with Logic etc. You couldn't even fit one track on a zip disk sometimes. And even if you could, you'd probably need about twenty five of them to cover the whole song!

Yeah, because you'd do everything audio. So when I sample something, like a 'ding' from a Roy Ayers keyboard, that one sample is 2MB or something, but I can change the pitch of it in the sampler to cover the whole keyboard so I can write the whole melody, but it's still 2MB in the end. If you did that in Logic, that 2MB would multiply with every note if you kept retuning the audio.

So other than memory space, why is it that you use an MPC in this day and age?

The best thing about the MPC is the sound. If I did the same track arrangement with the same samples but in a computer, it just wouldn't sound as good. Also, I've always been doing music without looking at a screen so I know the sequences of bars.

I guess it's often quicker to type in numbers than it is to move a mouse around a screen. So when you say 'the sound of the MPC', you mean the on-board filters etc. that you can use to mess with the sample once you've loaded it in?

The filter of the MPC 3000… you can't beat that shit with a computer!!! It's just so simple, but so fat. You can do all kinds of things with the computer but being simple works better for me. My music is simple. My music is all about the groove and the loop and general happiness.

Yep. It's all very up tempo and chunky. You do have similarities with other US house kinda artists because I can hear the hip hop influence, but I can often tell a track is made by you right from the beginning.

Yeah. If you know music, you know it's by me.

Do you think that your love for hip hop pointed you in the direction of the MPC? It's probably even more famous in that world than it is in house.

Yeah, totally. Hip hop is what I listen to at home, in my car. And we're not talking about the new hip hop… it's the stuff made by the MPC3000 or the earlier MPCs, and the E-mu SP-1200. Like DJ Premier (Dr Dre is another notable fan of the MPC3000).

He's still working now and uses an Akai S950 for that same 12-bit sound (hear DJ Premier's beats as part of Gang Starr below on 'Mass Appeal').

The MPC3000 was the first I can remember that was 16 bit but sometimes I like something more lo fi. 12-bit sounds more bassy, so in that case I will use the SP-1200 for all the sampling and messing around and then connect it to the MCP3000 for sequencing. Some people use 24-bit sound but to me that's too crisp, too clean.

I know what you mean. Even though we're talking about machines here, a more lo-fi sound from old hardware can sound a bit more human, that's the funny thing.

Oh yeah, the MPC is totally human! Sometimes the MPC makes me totally crazy and I'm fighting with it. Sometimes it doesn't repeat the loops properly so it might play one of them late and I'm thinking "where's that clap?" and then it comes in in a totally different place.

So it would have done sixteen beats perfectly and then the seventeenth it's just randomly moved it… and I can't do shit about it! Sometimes it's so cool but sometimes I have to to fight!

I guess some of the best things that happen in the creative process are mistakes though.

Well my music is all about mistakes! You laugh, but you've totally got it. I've made so many tracks where the main groove has been an accident. Now I'm wise enough to understand when a good accident happens that I save it and make a track out of it.

I can imagine that pressing buttons on hardware is more likely to encourage accidents as well, especially if there's more than one person using the same piece of kit.

Yeah you're probably right about that.

So what inspired you to actually buy the MPC3000, and also to buy a sampler in the first place way back in the day?

The MPC3000 was because of people like Jay Dee, and I can remember when I first got it, going "Yes!! I found that same sound!". But originally it was just that a sampler was the only way I could make music. I couldn't afford to buy a syntehsizer and a sequencer so I went for a sampler with its own sequencer.

Back then I was inspired by a lot of music but remember, I had no idea at the time what artist used what equipment. It wasn't like now where you could just go on the internet and type someone's name into google and find out.

He's not wrong about that. We thank Phil for baring all to us about his studio set up and being the latest producer who has nothing to hide from google. And if you want to catch him for his last Ibiza appearance of the summer, you can buy tickets here.

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