A way to change a program during a live ?

Hi !

A question that's certainly been asked before.

I use the MPC1000 to make beats, but mostly as a sequencer for live electro (with an MC303 and K-Station).

A friend and I used it the same way years ago (with two MPC2500s and a multitude of synths and drum machines), but having overloaded both MPCs with samples and MIDI, we were forced to load a new PGM in the middle of a live performance.
Neither of us were great live keyboard players, so we just pressed a few notes on an atmospheric pad to give ourselves time to load the new program.
A completely useless technique

Creating an electro live performance again, I'm looking for an idea to replace this technique.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know !

Thanks in advance and have a nice day.

i'll give some suggestions, if you already know some of them please ignore them , they might be useful for other users:

1) optimize OPTIMIZE! always trim your samples the best you can to shorten them. always use mono samples when stereo information isnt ABSOLUTELY necessary, example: drum hits must be mono! if you have stereo samples go to trim page, edit, use the STEREO TO MONO function. if you dont have jjos2xl i suggest you invest on it. you can then use non destructive chopping which is real handy and a bunch of other cool features. try to avoid having different copies of the same sample. with non destructive chopping this is easier as you can , say , chop up a vocal sample where each chop starts from a different part of the loop and can even overlap with other slices. remember you can load the same sample on different pads with different settings (pitch, filter, reverse etc...) without having to duplicate the sample itself and waste precious RAM.

2) PURGE! dont forget to purge your project of ANY unused sample.

3) use SHORT samples of , if you cant, try to sample them the oldschool way, pitched up so they are faster and create smaller files, then you can repitch them inside the mpc. of course the quality (actual sample rate) drops, but sometimes its even better, with some additional digital garbage giving some flava (yea, sometimes they just sound shittier).

4) if the above isnt enough i suggest you invest in an sp404mk2. not only it is a great machine, not only you can use it live as a great FX box to put the mpc into, but you can load really LONG samples (think: whole songs) into it so you can use it to "cover" when you need to load up a new program or a new entire project. the sp is a hell of a cool machine by itself by the way, incredible bang for the buck factor.

Thank you very much for your reply !

So I already know pretty much what you recommended except... the purge !
I've never tried it because I've always been afraid it would delete some of the samples I wanted to keep (yes, I'm a bit of an idiot ).
As soon as I've finished all the samples, I'll try the purge to erase the ones I didn't end up using.

Otherwise, regarding the SP404, I have the SP303, which unfortunately has much less capacity, but I was thinking of using it to add a decent melody (or something else, but just not a nappa ) that I can loop while loading the next program.

I'll try all that.
Thanks again for your reply.

yes i'm sure you can use the 303 to some extent! cool, hope the purge will help you freeing up some ram! glad to be helpful.

Solid advice from Hyena there

I'll add - if you save your songs as single sequences, you can copy a whole sequence to the next & just set the program file to the alternative one - that's if I understand correctly in wanting to switch a program mid track of course!

cool trick as well @Moot , but it will work only if you already have the program and its samples in the pool.

Yep of course - takes some planning & prep work.

yeah but what i mean is that as i understood it , the need to load up a new program (or project) comes because the OP already finished up the available RAM

Yep that appears to be the issue, but like you said - gotta work within the limitations & be super efficient with sample size per project, using mono as much as possible is a big help.
I recently put together a 2 hour live set, continuous beats, all in one project file amounting to about 100mb - it can be done!

It should be even easier the OP also as they're sequencing a lot of midi synths, so in theory shouldn't need as much heavy sampling data - those mb's should stretch further

Moot wrote:Yep that appears to be the issue, but like you said - gotta work within the limitations & be super efficient with sample size per project, using mono as much as possible is a big help.
I recently put together a 2 hour live set, continuous beats, all in one project file amounting to about 100mb - it can be done!

It should be even easier the OP also as they're sequencing a lot of midi synths, so in theory shouldn't need as much heavy sampling data - those mb's should stretch further

absolutely, it can be done, me too i performed numerous 2 hours+ livesets during the years, sometimes with extra synths sometimes just mpc.