A tape-recorder company moves into instruments.

Akai Professional began as part of a much older Japanese company. Akai Electric was founded in Tokyo by Masukichi Akai and his son Saburo Akai; English Wikipedia gives the founding year as 1929, while Japanese sources it cites give 1946 for Akai Electric and 1923 for an earlier family business, so we note both. Outside Japan the company was best known for its tape recorders in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1984 Akai formed a division to make and sell electronic instruments, called Akai Professional. A company history from around 1999, preserved by the Internet Archive, says “Akai Professional entered the electronic musical instrument world in 1984,” and the Akai Professional website was still using that date in 2017. The first product, according to the same company material, was the MG1212, a 12-channel, 12-track recorder that used a cartridge similar to a VHS tape. Samplers followed: the S612 in 1985, the S900 in 1986 and the S1000 in 1988, all reviewed in British music magazines at the time, English Wikipedia’s product list shows.

The parent company did not last. In December 1999 the brand of the musical instrument division was bought by a US-based company, and Akai Professional Musical Instrument Corporation was formed, according to that company’s own history and a 2005 report in the Kanagawa Shimbun. Akai Electric filed for insolvency in November 2000, owing creditors about US$1.1 billion, Bloomberg reported in 2009; the Akai consumer name has since belonged to Grande Holdings of Hong Kong, which is unrelated to today’s Akai Professional. The Japanese company set up in 1999 to make and sell the instruments, Akai Professional M.I., based in Yokohama, entered bankruptcy proceedings at the Tokyo District Court in December 2005, the Kanagawa Shimbun reported.

Roger Linn and the MPC60.

The product that defines the brand is the MPC, first called the MIDI Production Center and now the Music Production Center. It was a collaboration between Akai and the American engineer Roger Linn, who had designed the LM-1 and LinnDrum drum machines; his company, Linn Electronics, had closed after its Linn 9000 failed. Linn told Sonic State that the partnership “was a good fit because Akai needed a creative designer with ideas and I didn’t want to do sales, marketing, finance or manufacturing, all of which Akai was very good at.”

In the same interview Linn described the MPC as an attempt to “properly re-engineer” the Linn 9000. He said he designed the functions, the panel layout and the hardware specification, and wrote the software with his team, and he credited the circuitry to a team led by the English engineer David Cockerell; Akai handled production engineering. The MPC60 was released on 8 December 1988, MusicRadar reported, and sold for about $5,000, according to Vox. It was followed by the MPC60 MkII and the MPC3000, Sound On Sound noted in 2002.

The design idea was a grid of sixteen large, pressure-sensitive rubber pads in place of small buttons, so that short samples could be assigned to pads and played like a drum kit or keyboard. Vox wrote in 2018 that “it wasn’t an enormous, stationary mixing panel with as many buttons as an airplane cockpit.” The 4×4 pad grid was later adopted by many other makers and became standard on DJ equipment, English Wikipedia says, and the MPC is closely associated with hip-hop: producers such as DJ Shadow, J Dilla and Kanye West used it.

Linn left after Akai’s instrument business changed hands and went on to found Roger Linn Design in 2001. Akai has continued the MPC line without him, from the MPC2000 of 1997 to the MPC Live and MPC X of 2017 and the MPC One of 2020, all reviewed by Sound On Sound.

Controllers and the computer studio.

A controller keyboard makes no sound of its own: it sends MIDI, the standard that lets instruments and computers talk to one another. Dave Smith demonstrated it at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, and the specification was published that August, English Wikipedia says. A newer extension, MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE), which lets each note in a chord be shaped separately, was adopted by the MIDI Manufacturers Association in January 2018.

Two makers here share an owner. Akai Professional and M-Audio belong to inMusic, the private group in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Jack O’Donnell, its founder, bought Akai Professional in 2004 or 2005 — sources differ — and inMusic took over M-Audio, founded in 1988 as Midiman, from Avid in July 2012.

The others are smaller. Nektar Technology is “California-based,” Sound On Sound wrote in 2019; the company dates itself to 2009. Keith McMillen Instruments, of Berkeley, California, announced in September 2024 that it was rebranding as Muse Kinetics. ROLI, maker of the Seaboard, is London-based; after its original company entered administration in 2021, a new company took over the brand, English Wikipedia says.

Two are European. Expressive E calls itself a French company founded in 2013, and its legal notice gives a registered office in Marseille. Studiologic is a brand of Fatar, the keyboard-mechanism maker founded in Recanati, in Italy’s Marche, in 1956; Fatar says it has factories in Recanati and in Tunisia.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An inMusic brand from Rhode Island.

The brand’s present owner is Jack O’Donnell, who bought the DJ equipment maker Numark in 1992 and Alesis in 2001. Sources differ on when he acquired Akai Professional: English Wikipedia’s Akai article says 2004, “following a US distribution deal,” while inMusic’s own history says 2005, as did a 2018 profile in the German magazine Amazona. In 2012 O’Donnell formed inMusic Brands as the parent of his companies, English Wikipedia says, and inMusic is headquartered in Cumberland, Rhode Island, with offices in Canada, Germany, the UK, Taiwan, Japan and Bulgaria.

Under inMusic the brand has widened from samplers to controllers. Sound On Sound has reviewed its APC40 and APC20 controllers for Ableton Live (2009 and 2010) and MPK keyboard controllers from 2008 on, and the brand’s website points buyers to its own store for MPC sounds and software. Its sister brands include M-Audio, bought from Avid in 2012, and Moog, which joined in June 2023, MusicRadar reported. inMusic says Native Instruments joined the group in 2026.

Akai Professional describes itself as a pioneer of music production technology. The company pages we read — its own, inMusic’s and older archived versions — do not say where its hardware is made, so we make no claim about it. The consumer Akai name, on televisions and appliances, is a separate business owned by Grande Holdings; the instrument brand is found at akaipro.com.

For a design guide, Akai Professional shows how a single interface — sixteen square pads — can become a brand’s identity, carried from a 1988 sampler to today’s standalone machines. Compare Numark, the company where inMusic began, and Moog, its synthesizer stablemate. For this guide we use a pad red with black and chassis grey and a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Akai Professional’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.