Drums cutting eachother off despite "mute group" function be

I got an MPC500 pretty recently for making beats in the living room away from my computer (too many distractions) and on the road since I'm in a touring band.

I spent a bit of time learning the basic functions and after getting through the menu diving (which is honestly not that bad once you learn where everything is) I cranked out a weak, but passable beat with it.

Now that I started on another beat things are going wrong. Basically every sample I have is cutting eachother off. I have the bass samples set to the same mute group so they cut eachother off, which is what I want. Yet none of the drums (which I have in bank B) are even set on any mute group (aka Mute group is OFF) Yet they are cutting eachother off. When I lay down hi-hats and then add in kick and snare, the kick and snare are muting the hi hats. Once I'm done with that I can't even play any of my bass samples as they are cut off by the drums! What's going on here? I even have the bass and drums on separate tracks, this should not be happening.

I tried to troubleshoot this today and just became more confused and infuriated. I loaded my program and cleared everything off the ram and tried to lay down a drum sequence. This time it worked. The kick hats and snare all rang out. As I played it back, after about a minute though some of the hats started disappearing!!! I restarted the machine again and the drums were cutting eachother off again! After several tries I finally got a 4 bar sequence recorded and saved it to my cf card. When I laid down the baseline it cut off half the drums but left the others. I restarted an loaded my sequence and my hihats are gone!!!! I really don't wan to return the unit but I don't think this is a user error at this point

Are you using fresh Programs?

Must use fresh Programs or all your old settings will be passed on the old Program even though you cleared it.

Yes. I load my own program that I made for the song and clear all memory

Clear memory only clears the RAM but the Programs which are rooted in the CF card remain as is.

What RAM are you using and capacity of the CF card?

If I remember correctly, the MPC 500 programs can be set to mono or poly. If it is mono, set it to poly.

Edit: It's under the setting "voice overlap" in program mode.

128mb for both. I only have 1 program which is my own. Besides the stock stuff

Ocular wrote:If I remember correctly, the MPC 500 programs can be set to mono or poly. If it is mono, set it to poly.

Edit: It's under the setting "voice overlap" in program mode.

I looked under that and All that controls is the voice settings on each individual pad and whether each pad cuts itself off, I don't see one that controls that for the whole program.

That said I MIGHT have found the culprit. I realized the wall outlet in the van i'm traveling in was not turned on, so I was actually running off batteries. Later last night I plugged it into the 12V adapter with and the problem went away. The drum sequence I created was intact and I was able to lay down the bassline with no problem. So it might have just been that I was running low on battery power and was using some rather hefty samples (about 50mb of the 128mb)

I have an 8 hour car ride tomorrow so I'll really be able to get to the bottom of it and will report if it persists or not. I really hope that's the case because I don't want to return this thing. I really like it and there aren't really any other units that do what the 500 does in terms of portability, other than the 404 but I hate the workflow on that thing.