MPC 500 Live Setup for Band w/ MIDI (noob question?)

I'm in a four-piece band, and we used to have a keyboardist. Our old songs that used to feature him don't really sound any different or inferior now that he's not in it, but on a couple songs, there are some ambient pads he used that we'd like to retain in the live shows. One idea to the solution was to have our bassist with a MIDI foot controller, with the pedals programmed to plays samples of the original recordings that I still have. But we'd like to try and keep our total rig size down and if possible, avoid laptops or extraneous cabling.

I noticed that the MPC 500 has Midi in and Out, and was wondering if this would be possible. So, in theory, if it worked, I'd load the samples into the MPC, and then set it up so that the foot pedals will trigger the different samples, instead of the pads on the mpc. Am I off, or would this actually work? I've never really worked with MPC's at all before, but have been curious for some time, and with this recent transformation of our band (new drummer, no more keyboards, and now 3 members sing instead of just me), this is a chance to jump down the rabbit hole and up the ante on our sound and I think this could be a cool way to do so.

A footswitch will most likely trigger a sequence to play and stop or record and overdub.

Far-fetched but if your drummer is using an e-drum kit, you can MIDI the MPC to the drum module and trigger samples from the drum kit. Kill two birds with one stone.

No e-kit with the drums, but I found out that this is in fact possible on another forum, though some adjustments may have to be made with the foot controller.