I used to practice doing a live set back in the day on the mpc to incorporate with my vinyl set. I used to do a lot of parties and only spin hardcore and shitcago house. What was I thinking? My advice, is keep it simple, the more shit you have, the things that can fail and make you look like a chump. Most live acts are just fronting, and have that shit on a multitrack somewhere, sometimes they have all that shit programed and add and drop tracks on the fly. When I tried to use keyboards for the live thing with tracks I already made, my sounds would get all **** up when i was in a rush, and sometimes the MIDI would fail. Thank god I never did that during a performance. If you are gonna do it, be calculating, and use as much of a minimal rig as possible. You can get slick at matching the mpc to a turntable and vice verse quick, and use that to flip drums, like drop out the bass and throw in some breaks, or drop a congo track on top to add a tribal flava. The MPC is more or less flawless, but then again you can do all that shit on a CD that you burned, and have less to worry about.
