AKAI Professional Force

I love the sound of the Force. It is an awesome sampler, has nice synth engines. It ist extremely extensive. You can record mic and guitar input, loop&overdub it in the looper mode, prepare a huge amount of snippets for live performance, create whole songs etc.

This complexity comes at a cost: It is heavy, I spend a lot of time tweaking sounds and thinking through patterns, micro adjusting notes and playing with plugins and tapping on the touch screen. This hindered me from being productive. I usually prepare projects with versatile drum kits, have user-defined synth sounds prepared and both audio tracks already prepared as a basis for all my new projects.

If you don't really need that many options and you want to be more productive on your couch, I would recommend smaller groove boxes e.g. Elektron Model:Samples over or in addition to the Force.

It's hard to summarize everything this beast can do. Ableton Live sets can be transferred to this machine in a near perfect way (you may encounter minor issues related to project file structure, but google is your friend for that). I don't mind the fact that it's heavy, I mean it's a workstation. The best selling point for me is : even if you're a DAW user, switching to this portable workflow won't be that hard. Took me a few days of youtube videos and I felt quite at ease with it. It's another mindset for sure, but the interface is pleasant to navigate. It worked for me, but depending on your purpose, it may be an overkill as well.