need advice before buying akai mpc 500

stateofflux

im a drummer looking for a sampler to trigger movie bits/keyboard samples live (no click tracks)...with one roland drum pad. say if i have ten samples recorded into the akai is it possible to change the sample it triggers after each song?

any advice appreciated...everything else i looked at is a one pad..one sample..midi note thing.....

MilanPan!c

stateofflux wrote: »

im a drummer looking for a sampler to trigger movie bits/keyboard samples live (no click tracks)...with one roland drum pad. say if i have ten samples recorded into the akai is it possible to change the sample it triggers after each song?

any advice appreciated...everything else i looked at is a one pad..one sample..midi note thing.....

In theory yes, don't know enough about the specific gear, but can you set the different MPC pads to different MIDI channels? If so then changing the midi out channel on the drum pad and you'd be sorted.

Otherwise it could be a bit more tricky... Though there's prolly some simple trick I am not thinking of. No coffee yet.

Edit:

So you can't change what note the drum pad sends? Is that normal? If you can, problem solved.

stateofflux

thanks for the help...

what i found out is that midi signals are note specific...if i have a keyboard each key can only trigger one thing via midi...so im guessing drum pad = 1 note on a midi keyboard = problem...

im just asking if you can change what note is triggered with pad in a live situation easily on the akai....id just want to hit pad to start sample, hit again to stop.....

thanks again:)

MilanPan!c

stateofflux wrote: »

thanks for the help...

what i found out is that midi signals are note specific...if i have a keyboard each key can only trigger one thing via midi...so im guessing drum pad = 1 note on a midi keyboard = problem...

im just asking if you can change what note is triggered with pad in a live situation easily on the akai....id just want to hit pad to start sample, hit again to stop.....

thanks again:)

Here's what I found by looking at the MPC500 manual:

You can set different pads to different notes.

So, if the loops you want for track one is on pad one, and you set the pad to C1, then as long as the drum pad is set to send out on c1, you're sorted. Set pad 2 on the mpc500 to c#1 and then simply change the output note on the drum pad between songs...

right?

That shouldn't be tooo hard...

DamagedTrax

stateofflux wrote: »

thanks for the help...

what i found out is that midi signals are note specific...if i have a keyboard each key can only trigger one thing via midi...so im guessing drum pad = 1 note on a midi keyboard = problem...

im just asking if you can change what note is triggered with pad in a live situation easily on the akai....id just want to hit pad to start sample, hit again to stop.....

not sure about the akai but most midi controllers have what are called "snapshots". you save a snapshot with pads set-up to trigger specific samples and then change your snapshot for a different setup. bascially preset banks.

Doge

Which roland drum pad are you using?

If you could change the midi channel from 1 to 16 it would be sweet.

The mpc500 allows you to have 16 midi tracks/channels,
so this means on midi channel 1 you could have all the samples loaded for one song,

on midi channel 2, you could have all the samples loaded for the next song.... and so on.

It would solely be a case of changing the midi channel on the drum pad in between songs.


The Alesis Control Pad would be more suited to this task,
as you can set the note and midi channel for each individual pad live!

Actually, I'm looking to swap an Alesis Performance Pad for the Control Pad if anyones interested, i need the more advanced midi options over the built in sounds, and sequencer.

Doge

I've been reading the manual and looks like i was wrong about having 1 set of samples per midi channel.

The mpc500 has four sample banks,
with 12 pads/samples per bank allowing upto a total of 48 samples.

I couldnt see if you could assign a midi channel to each of the 4 banks.

I thought it may have been the same setup as my groovebox,
where i can have a sample bank for each of the 16 midi tracks.