Tag Archives: midi controller

AKAI MPC for Nintendo Switch? This concept turns a gaming console into a live production rig

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If you can emulate Nintendo devices on laptops, why can’t you emulate laptop software on a Switch? That’s pretty much Alquemy’s train of thought when it came to this concept which merges the worlds of gaming and music in a way that would make Guitar Hero look like child’s play. The Akai MPC Switch are two controller units designed to snap onto the sides of a Switch console, turning your gaming rig into a live music production factory. Unlike your average Guitar Hero controller, this thing is as serious as it gets. MIDI inputs and outputs, a fairly detailed DAW running on the Switch’s screen, and a myriad of controls that let you deejay or produce music on the fly.

To be honest, this concept does give you pause for thought. Why can’t a capable gaming rig also handle other high-intensity software? Music production, 3D modeling, video editing, everything you’d otherwise do on a studio-grade machine. Sure, the Switch isn’t as powerful as an iMac, but that doesn’t mean it can’t handle anything a MacBook Air can. The MPC Switch (albeit conceptual) are a pretty brilliant idea if you think about it – imagine being able to game when you’re bored and produce/perform music when you need to, all on the same machine. Just swap out the Joy-Cons for this MIDI setup and you’re good to go!

Designer: Alquemy

The AKAI MPC, for those who don’t know, holds a special place in the music hall of fame, with artists from Dr. Dre to John Mayer to Mark Ronson to even Kanye West using the hardware to create some of their most legendary work. The MPC (or MIDI Production Center) is, simply put, a sampler and sequencer, allowing you to load audio banks, record music samples/loops, and play them back in a sequence. Think of it as a device that lets you build your track together, brick by brick.

It’s no different from how you’d play games like Street Fighter, mashing together buttons in a variety of combinations to make up your routine. The only difference is here, you record tracks/sounds/effects, and mash buttons to create drum loops, synth patterns, leads, and choruses. Individual sounds can be tweaked too, with the ability to adjust EQ, apply effects, or even modulate live music, thanks to the MIDI inputs and outputs on the device.

This basically means your Switch isn’t just a gaming console anymore, it’s also a live music console. USB-C and SD Card slots on the Switch let you load tracks, sound banks, etc… and the MPC Switch’s hardware give you even more ports, letting you connect your Switch to a more professional setup with anything from electronic instruments to a turntable to even a mixing deck for live recording.

Now this isn’t the kind of idea that would come to your average Nintendo or AKAI exec… you’d need to be slightly eccentric to draw such a brilliant parallel, which designer Phil Rose (who goes by Alquemy online) definitely did. The MPC Switch is incredibly detailed, even down to the software running on the Switch’s display. The only problem is that it’s entirely conceptual, which breaks my heart a bit. If anyone from Nintendo or AKAI is seeing this, you guys are sitting on an absolute goldmine that would not only break the music industry but might also end up creating a new handheld gaming hardware category!

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Teenage Engineering-inspired Music Sampler Uses AI In The Nerdiest Way Possible

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The T.M-4 looks like it escaped from Teenage Engineering’s design studio with a specific mission: teach beginners how to make music using AI without making them feel stupid, or without creating slop. Junho Park’s graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE’s playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them. The device handles the technical translation automatically, separating audio into layers and letting you manipulate them through physical controls. It feels like someone took the OP-1’s attitude and wired it straight into an AI stem separator.

The homage succeeds because Park absorbed what makes Teenage Engineering products special beyond their appearance. TE hardware feels different because it removes friction between intention and result, making complex technology feel approachable through thoughtful interface design and immediate tactile feedback. The T.M-4 brings that same thinking to AI music generation. You’re manipulating machine learning model parameters when you adjust texture, energy, complexity, and brightness, but the physical controls make it feel like direct manipulation of sound rather than abstract technical adjustment. An SD card system lets you swap AI personalities like you would game CDs from a gaming console – something very hardware, very tactile, very TE. Instead of drowning in model settings, you collect cards that give the AI different characters, making experimentation feel natural rather than intimidating.

Designer: Junho Park

What makes this cool is how it attacks the exact point where most beginners give up. Think about the first time you tried to remix a track and realized you had no clean drums, no isolated vocals, nothing you could really move around without wrecking the whole thing. Here, you feed audio in through USB-C, a mic, AUX, or MIDI, and the system just splits it into drum, bass, melody, and FX layers for you. No plugins, no routing, no YouTube rabbit hole about spectral editing. Suddenly you are not wrestling with the file, you are deciding what you want the bass to do while the rest of the track keeps breathing.

The joystick and grid display combo help simplify what would otherwise be a fairly daunting piece of gear. Instead of staring at a dense DAW timeline, you get a grid of dots that represent sections and layers, and you move through them like you are playing with a handheld console. That mental reframe matters. It turns editing into navigation, which is far less intimidating than “production.” Tie that to four core parameters, texture, energy, complexity, brightness, and you get a system that quietly teaches beginners how sound behaves without ever calling it a lesson. You hear the track get busier as you push complexity, you feel the mood shift when you drag energy down, and your brain starts building a map.

Picture it sitting next to a laptop and a cheap MIDI keyboard, acting as a hardware front end for whatever AI engine lives on the computer. You sample from your phone, your synth, a YouTube rip, whatever, then sculpt the layers on the T.M-4 before dumping them into a DAW. It becomes a sort of AI sketchpad, a place where ideas get roughed out physically before you fine tune them digitally. That hybrid workflow is where a lot of music tech is quietly drifting anyway, and this concept leans straight into it.

Of course, as a student project, it dodges the questions about latency, model size, and whether this thing would melt without an external GPU. But as a piece of design thinking, it lands. It treats AI as an invisible assistant, not the star of the show, and gives the spotlight back to the interface and the person poking at it. If someone like Teenage Engineering, or honestly any brave mid-tier hardware company, picked up this idea and pushed it into production, you would suddenly have a very different kind of beginner tool on the market. Less “click here to generate a track,” more “here, touch this, hear what happens, keep going.”

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The “Willy Wonka” of musical instruments created this oddly appealing portable MIDI guitar

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Nobody has destroyed, rebuilt, and reimagined the notion of synthesizers as much as Love Hultén. The maverick synth-maker is credited with designing some of the most incredible-looking electronic music machines out there (we’ve covered a fair few), from synths and loopers to modular electro units and even some record players and arcade games on the side. The Sweden-based music aficionado and synth-builder kicked off 2024 with a new project in collaboration with ‘catbeats’. Although this particular device doesn’t have a name yet, Hultén mentioned that it’s a unique-looking MIDI guitar that has a NESpoly synth on the inside, and a detachable fretboard that makes the entire apparatus easy to travel with.

Designer: Love Hultén

The unconventional design of the MIDI instrument is just about as much of a hat top to a guitar as possible. It does have a fretboard that triggers notes, and a dedicated strumming section for chords and such, but you’ve also got a variety of knobs and buttons that loop, modulate, play/pause, and increase/decrease the gain of what you’re playing.

The entire design can be disassembled for travel, and features a few quirky details made specifically for the user. Given catbeats’ obsession with felines, the guitar has a cat avatar in the bottom corner underneath a removable clear dome. Reminiscent of those cat backpacks that have the pet behind a clear plastic structure, the dome can be removed to access the tiny avatar underneath, and the avatar is made to be replaceable too, allowing you to swap out cats based on mood. Hultén also details that the guitar’s strap is made from ‘extraterrestrial skin’, although that’s just fancy wording given that the strap’s crafted from a clear flexible plastic sheet (or maybe aliens have better skincare than I do)…

MIDI guitars are unusual to come by, although if I did expect them, it would probably be from Hultén. The Gothenburg-based artist has worked on some rather unique and inspiring electronic products, from a circular Game Boy to a synth made from plastic dentures. Sure, this guitar doesn’t feature too high on Hultén’s weirdness scale, but it’s a remarkable representation of how his brain works.

Close-up view of the avatar area and the removable plastic dome.

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