Akai ME-35T
Eight drum pads walk into a MIDI rig, and the ME-35T decides which strikes get through and how hard.
Overview
The ME-35T is Akai's audio/MIDI trigger interface. It accepts eight inputs from electronic drum trigger pads, microphones, or other input devices and converts them into MIDI note-on messages. That's the whole job. Akai built it for drummers who wanted their acoustic or pad hits to drive a MIDI sound source without hauling a full sampling workstation to the gig. The pitch to the professional player was response speed and control depth. The manual describes it as particularly well suited to the needs of the professional drummer.
The note conversion isn't the interesting part, since plenty of boxes did that. What stands out is how much of the trigger behavior Akai exposed to the user. Each of the eight inputs gets its own sensitivity setting (0 to 127 per the MPC60 manual, 0 to 99 per the S1000 manual), a trigger threshold (0 to 127 per the MPC60 manual, 0 to 99 per the S1000 manual), a capture time (0 to 31 per the MPC60 manual, 0 to 20ms per the S1000 manual), a recovery time (0 to 31 per the MPC60 manual, 0 to 20ms per the S1000 manual), an on-time (0 to 4095 in 1/100 sec increments per the MPC60 manual, 0 to 999ms per the S1000 manual), and a choice of eight velocity response curves. That's a lot of tuning per pad.
Capture time is the parameter worth understanding. It sets how long the ME-35T samples the incoming signal to determine note velocity, and it's a compromise. Faster response means less accurate dynamics. Slower capture means better velocity resolution but more latency. Recovery time handles the opposite problem. It's the window after a trigger during which further triggers are blocked, which stops stick bounce from firing a machine-gun burst of false notes. Set it too long and fast drum rolls get choked. Set it too short and every bounce becomes a note.
The on-time parameter sets the gap between the note-on and the following note-off, in hundredths of a second. That lets the ME-35T drive keyboard sounds rather than just drum samples, because a held note length turns a pad hit into a sustained synth note. The eight velocity curves let the player match strike dynamics to MIDI velocity, and the documentation notes that curves 1 through 4 work best with synthesizers using logarithmic response. There's also an automatic MIDI soft-thru feature that routes anything arriving at the MIDI input straight to the output. It has a known trap: if the host device also has soft-thru enabled, you get a feedback loop. The fix is to disable MIDI drum data output on the host.
Two ME-35T units can be chained for a total of 16 trigger inputs, which is how Akai positioned it inside its own ecosystem. The unit shows up repeatedly as a companion device in Akai's sampler manuals. The MPC60, S1000, and S3000XL all include dedicated screens for remote programming of one or two ME-35Ts over MIDI. You can edit sensitivity, trigger level, capture, recovery, on-time, and curve from the sampler's larger display instead of the ME-35T's own more limited controls. The MPC60 manual includes a whole section on this, and the S1000 manual describes the combination as the basis for a very sophisticated electronic percussion setup. The MIDI Exclusive channel is set on the ME-35T itself by pressing the MIDI CH and MIDI NOTE buttons simultaneously. Everything else can be handled remotely. Settings can be saved to the host's internal memory, to parameter files, or to floppy disk depending on the sampler.
Bought standalone, the ME-35T is a competent trigger interface with an unusually deep parameter set and a fairly cryptic front panel. Bought as the front end for an Akai sampler, it becomes something closer to a proper electronic percussion system, with the sampler doing the sound generation and the ME-35T doing the translation.
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