Dre spends hours upon hours digging through his ridiculously large librabry of records to find his samples. He also brings in musicians to play a lot of the stuff you here on his productions. As far as the keyboard, Dre is in the process of learning to play the piano, until then he relies on keyboardist Scott Storch. Dre also has another ace in his pocket in his in- house bass player Rene Elizondo. This is where the rumor that Dre has a bunch of ghost producers making all of his beats comes from, but make no mistake, Dre is the master mind behind it all. Now the difference between the mpc and the triton is that the triton is a synthesizer and the mpc is a sampling drum machine/sequencer. Yes the triton has a sampler in it but you can't sequence a rack of modules on your triton. With the mpc you can sample as well as sequence keyboards and sound modules. To me the best way to think of the mpc is a sequencer first and sampler second and the triton as a synth first, sampler second and sequencer last. As in all things related to music and gear, this is all subjective. What it all comes down to is the person using the equipment, not the equipment being used. I myself have a motif(yamaha's answer to the triton) and the mpc. The motif has and sampler and sequencer in it but I prefer to use the mpc for these tasks, that's just the way I like to work. It sounds like your pretty new to producing so it will be a while before you figure out what works best for you. Damn this is a long post, I'll shut up now.
