Help: Looking for HW version of Live for gigs - MPC, MV or ?

[Seattle_Ray]

Hi All,

Hoping someone here can help me figure out my current dilemna. I play in a live band regularly and we're looking to add a few pre-recorded parts to some of our songs. For instance, we'd love to add some additional vocal harmonies, another guitar, keys, organ, etc, depending on the needs of the song. We're a country band. So we wouldn't typically use most of the electronica, hip hop, dance focused sounds that are associated with MPC/MV's.

I have Live7 along with a Macbook (white) and FW410 sound card. I can accomplish all my needs with this setup, but in a live situation it seems quite cumbersome and prone to technical issues. I'm looking for a similar hardware based setup that I can rely on to just work everytime.

-I need to be able to have 4-5 audio samples playing for possibly the length of a typical 4 minute song (mono is fine)
-I need to either be able to load multiples songs at one time or hopefully have a very fast song load time on the hardware unit, so we're not twiddling our thumbs between sets.
-I prefer to be able to route each part to it's own output, but I can work around this if I need to
-I don't really need to trigger additional loops once the song has started. I may want to do this later down the line, but for now it would be fire off a song and let it play to the end.
-Ideally, I'd love to be able to assign each song to it's own pad, so I can just reach over and start the next song without too much trouble. So, I'd have to be able to assign a distinct tempo to each pad (kind of like we can do with scenes in Live).

I've looked at the MPC's and I really love the form factor of the MPC1000. Has enough outputs. But I'm concerned about the limited amount of RAM for loading songs. I don't have any experience with MPC's, so i'm not sure how long a typical song would take to load and this is critical for a live gig scenario.

I've also looked at the MV8800 and it seems awesome, but it's quite big for hauling around to gigs and lacks the audio outputs (although there is an expansion card...if you can find one). Also, it's very expensive compared to the MPC.

I'm also open to other ideas if anyone else has experience in this sort of live band situation. I'm not completely opposed to just using Live with my Macbook, but I am extremely concerned about complexity and reliability.

Thanks in advance for your help

[Tone Deft]

the Roland SP808 comes to mind, it's a sampler but works great for long playback. it's also easier to use than an MPC and doubles as a nice little 4 track recorder.

[SuperBassMexican]

I'd go with the sp samplers. starting with sp-404 and up.

[Seattle_Ray]

Thanks for the fast replies. I'll take a look at the SP samplers. Any other thoughts? Anyone else have any ideas?

[starving student]

I'd go with an 808 as well if you can stand the dreaded 'disk to busy' error, if you're not trying to record your sample triggering to the 4track you should be alright but on second thought if you don't even need the 4track then the sp-404 will do great and no drive to busy errors since you're not having to deal with zip disk/drive

[Nick the Zombie]

+1 on the sp-808. It got slightly panned in some reviews because the marketing for it was a little silly on the whole "you can do everything in with this one machine" trip, but the reality is that it's a sick machine for doing just what you're asking about. Good luck with your choice!