Best DAW to work with MPC1000

I love my MPC1000 for its vibe. But its limited memory and dingy A/D convertors make me crazy.
I'm thinking of using the MPC100 to make my beats but use a DAW software to play the actual sounds/samples/waves songs for live use.
what do you recommend???? My concern is that instead of making just loops..I want to be able to make whole sets of songs.
Suggestions??
GtrGeorge

Well on a Mac with Logic I believe you can't slave it to an MPC, so you have to have the DAW be the MIDI master. May not matter, but almost all other DAWs will let you make either the MIDI master or slave.

For what you asked using the DAW as a sound module/instrument rack in tandem with an MPC, Reason and Ableton Live are great choices. Live is more geared towards being able to a lot of amazing stuff with recorded audio, many, many things you could not do on the MPC alone.

And it's time stretching is excellent and intuitive, even works well to just load up a ton of loops get the bpm's matched perfect, whether to export for MPC standalone use or just in a session with both running. You can match things that would take a lot of work in other software in seconds in Ableton.

Reason might be a better choice if the sound generators are the main priority. It's instruments are better than Lives, but it does not do quite as much with recorded audio. But what's there is solid. Live isn't called Live for nothing. It's made to do exactly what you're describing your wants as.

You could use the more traditional ones like Cubase. But I think Reason or Live firt your needs better looking at how you posed the question.

Thanks for the suggestions..
so far Ableton Live isn't a solution for me because It seems Live doesnt really allow you have 60 or 80 songs cued up and ready to go. Its more focused on improvisation for Hip Hop/Rap artists..whereas I do old school rock stuff and need to have a click track and then verse chorus vers chorus break chorus 2x out and then silence and then the next song...for like 80 songs in a night.
I met with some people at Washington Music Center, they seemed knowledgeable and they initially pushed me towards Ableton, but because of what I mentioned backed off that.
I just looked at Presonus Studio One, but it seems half baked so far.
Any thing out there that would mate well with the MPC100?? If I had it my way, Id have an MPC1000 with 80GB RAM and many more features..but that doesnt exist.
GtrGeorge

I see, yes a rock/live scenario does change things. I don't know if the MPC would be the only MIDI device in your setup or your operating solo.

But perhaps a VST rack hosting program is more suited to your needs than a DAW

Here's an overview of one called Bloxpander, there are others out too. But the remit of these apps is geared towards live use.

Cool..
I will research on this! THANK YOU.
GtrGeorge

My pleasure man. I was actually just talking to a Facebook friend who does a lot of live stuff although one man electronic stuff...but still with similar needs as far as a VST app for stage use.

Here's a few others that came up in his thread.

http://www.tobybear.de/p_minihost.html

Although that one inexplicably lacks tap tempo which could be a real head ache in many situations.

Savihost is another one.

http://www.hermannseib.com/english/savihost.htm

Here's his (Mark Mosher) website - http://www.modulatethis.com/

He likely has some articles there about live setups, you may get some ideas. Great blog overall.

Thank you!!!!
My research is taking me all over the place. I might HAVE to buy a new portable PC..the old one has firewire, which while its a superior jack..is unsupported. So If I need to run a DAW LIVE...I cant lug my big home PC around..its would be ridiculous.
Alot of my research has me going back and forth..looking at videos on youtube,reading manuals, looking at what I already own that might be useful etc.
In every direction there are challenges.
1 Like: The MPC can only see 128MB memory
2 My current computer has Firewire out...but all new equipment doesn't support that.
3 The software out now is intriguing for making loop songs but for more traditional rock and pop stuff....it's the wrong tool. And it only gets worse if ya try to use it Live and for an entire gig (4 hours).
I will continue on this,however,undaunted.
Thanks for your idea..VERY appreciatted
GtrGeorge

GtrGeorge! wrote:Any thing out there that would mate well with the MPC100?? If I had it my way, Id have an MPC1000 with 80GB RAM and many more features..but that doesnt exist.

How are you using the MPC at the moment, what sort of sounds are you loading in there, full backing tracks as audio, individual drum hits, full length bassline samples, etc.?

Simon,
I use the Mpc1000 as a drum machine (I load in about 8 sounds. Kick,Snare 2hihats, cymbals and on a few pads I have a bass line(the verse) and on another pad, the other bassline (the Chorus). This works fine for a few songs but after a while 128MB isnt enough. I would have to purge every sample out and load all new samples to continue into a long set..and throughout an entire gig I would spnd alot of time juggling tasks (putting in memory cards,purging and loading in new bass lines and kits, the occasional keyboard part.
That's how Ive been using my MPC1000. But now I am reaching a point where I wonder if there is a better way, If I am gonna make a change I need to do it now. The gig season is slow,right now for me, but 2014 is gonna be crazy.
And Id like to make the 2014 gigs better than ever..with more realistic drum sounds and less parroting of parts (the same bassline with the same feel can get old fast...and this happens because of memory budgeting.
what do you suggest?
I already only use mono samples. I already use short basslines that I repeat alot. What else can I do? I would prefer to stay with my MPC1000 becuase I really like how it feels rhythyms. VERY intuitive. But all the challenges I face makes me look beyond it for solutions.
Any suggestions apprecatted. Remember I do Rock and Pop stuff..not Hip Hop/Rap..so that kind changes my needs somewhat.
GtrGeorge

You can have the benefits of both the MPC and a computer app involved. On the most general level what you would do is have the computer application housing all your sounds. This could be synths and sampling VST/AU's.

Then you would use the MPC as the 'MIDI brain". You would assign the various instruments or samplers in the computer app to receive on different MIDI channels. And then use different PGM's/tracks in the MPC to transmit the MIDI control data.

As you mentioned GtrGeorge this would open up the ability to have really nice velocity layered acoustic sampled kits in the computer. Kontakt and some the drum libraries they have are an option, there's also lite versions of BFD and E-Z Drummer if you don't need a ton of kits. And even the lite versions include some killer sounds.

As far as keeping everything flowing more smoothly you could look into sending program change MIDI messages to the VST's to be able to change patches from the MPC.

Once all the sounds are in the computer you don't have to worry as much or at all about stereo files, 24 bit samples and use the majority of the computer's RAM as opposed to the roughly 118MB or so that is available on the 1000 subtracting OS and MIDI Sequence data from the 128MB.

I suppose you might have to load more than one session in the computer app over the course of a whole show. But load times should be between 20 seconds to a minute at most. Perhaps in a rock show setting that's not a problem compared to hip-hop/electronic where many would want the music playing continuously.

That's just a general overview, I just wanted to give you some peace of mind that what you want should be achievable. Others here can offer more and a lot of guys here use MPC's live, and there will be some crossover to the basics of setting up what you want even when the genre differs.

You probably need to offload the bass and chorus samples to something else, or everything to something else.

Options for basslines might be to trigger the long samples over MIDI from an external sampler, or maybe to not use long samples for those sounds, and program a track within the MPC to play the bass line as individual notes from an external sound module such as your Proteus.

You might be able to use a rack mount sampler, such as the Akai S5000/S6000 or Z4/Z8 to play them back from the sampler hard disk, rather than the sampler RAM, but you would have to look into that.

Other options might be to use a computer running sampler software to trigger the longer samples from the MPC over MIDI, if you still want to use the MPC and not move everything into the computer. And again, maybe find something that will playback the samples from the hard drive, so you are not limited by what can be loaded into RAM.

Simon,
that is EXACTLY where my searches have landed me. Using the MPC1000 is just to restrictive..and if I want to do music live with samples, the only way to lose the "parroting" sounds of repititive patterns is to have alot of memory.
I think I will keep the MPC as an input tool..because I Suck without it, for getting drum parts the way I like. But beyond that I need to run a computer live.
And so then back to the central question, what DAW for LIVE use??
Ableton seems to be for loop musicians (Hip Hop/Rap fine.....but 80 songs in a night? Not really setup for that).
Reaper..I love the bizness model but it seems to have sync issues. I cant afford that at all...this is live gigs in front of alot of people.
Cubase: I like and use SX3 (yeah, I am a fossil...) but is it really good for this kinda thing?Is there something better? Helluva lotta bloatware in Cubase.
Any suggestions appreciatted.
GtrGeorge

Thanks to everyone who makes suggestions..

i have a few suggestions for you:

im not sure if im fully understanding exactly what your trying to do here and why your mpc is filling up so fast, but ill try my best to give you some examples you could research. are you not able to just use 4 kits or so a night? or are you sequencing whole songs on the mpc and just doing guitar/vocals live or something over top? is that why your ram is running out?

in your other thread thats why i was suggesting midi loops in combination with a smaller sample footprint (ie four kits on each bank), but it looks like you might be needing to sequence more than just drums on your mpc? if thats the case then maybe not an mpc would be the best? although it might also be possible to have your 4 kits in the mpc, sequence them, or use the pre made midi loops, then and on a new track, midi up the bass (and other instruments for that matter) from a different soundsource such as a motif rack or another sampler even.

in your other thread, you said that midi loops sounded repetitive and canned to you, but the beauty of them is that you can edit everything within a midi loop so it wont be repetitive if you dont want them to be.
in most of these midi packs, you buy one that is a certain style of music, and it has thousands of loops for that type of music. intro, verse, chorus, bridge ect ect.
thats why i was thinking it would be a good idea for you to look into those. it makes it so you can just take an intro, chorus, verse and just drop it right into your sampler, then just assign your drums to the same notes 1 time and your set for everything. this will make t so you dont have to spend the time and write a new drum pattern for each song, and if you want to make some small changes, its easy to do that too.
there is no reason why the midi drums should be repetitive or boring at all and im not sure why you were thinking that. the only way i could see them being repetitive is if you just had a 4 bar drum loop and repeated that for the whole song, but with these midi packs, they are tailored to be drum tracks for whatever type of music.

another thing you might want to think about is if you do only need drums and bass, have you thought of a drum machine as opposed to an mpc? i dont know how realistic people get these sounding as i dont do any live shows, but it seems that people use these quite often in their 1 man band setups. it might save you a lot of money too because they are usually pretty cheap.

alternately, have you thought of finishing the whole song(s) and just having a stereo .wav file of the backing track and you can do your thing over the top of it with guitar/vocals? i realize this may take a long time because your set is so long, but dont you have to go to the gig with something like this already? if you had your songs pre made like this, you could even just put them in intunes and run through a playlist of all your tracks like this. if you have intermissions, just put a song with some silence in it and pause it before you get up to get your drink or eat or whatever.

if you are looking for more realism than a drum machine, another thing to think about is a software drum program. there are drum programs like battery 3, bfd, ez drummmer ect. that might be something to think about. they are built to give you realistic sounding drums without a real drummer. again, they also make midi packs custom tailored to these programs, so there is no excuses for getting something that sounds repetitive or boring.
i use battery 3 for a lot of my drums (in my hip hop beats) and they have some great acoustic kits, but i think that bfd or ez drummer might be better for what your after because from my understanding, in one of these programs (or maybe both) you can mix in "room" tones and overheads for some of the kits which might be the added depth that your looking for.

also check this article out, its tips for more realistic drum programming:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep10/a ... m-prog.htm

hope this helps.

GtrGeorge! wrote:Using the MPC1000 is just to restrictive..and if I want to do music live with samples, the only way to lose the "parroting" sounds of repititive patterns is to have alot of memory.

I would use a rack mount sampler, rather than a computer, in a live situation, but computers obviously work fine in a live situation for many performers.

The later Akai rack samplers, I think, can playback samples or audio tracks from hard drive, so you do not necessarily need that much memory.

Also, with a sampler, you can use it many different ways.

You don't have to use it to playback a full song length pre-recorded bass line, or to playback loops, for example, you can use it as a bass sound module, playing the bass line using individual MIDI notes.

Do you have to use full song length pre-recorded basslines, you can't program the basslines into the MPC as a sequence, to playback the bassline from the Proteus via MIDI, thereby not needing any MPC or computer memory?

I spent about 3 hrs (again!!!) reading and researching tonight. Unless there is some really great specific sampler you recommend, I think I will set up a PC for live use running sequencing software..probably Cubase 5. I know Cubase pretty well, so there wont be any major learning curve. That's why Im going with Cubase. The competition is pretty similar,from what I see..but that learning curve could be tough (I am time limited).So I'll go with what I know.
And a PC has distinct advantage:I already own it! (Toshiba L655D) It can take 8GB max RAM...which will easily handle what I will throw at it.
The most unknown part of this,in my estimate, is the audio interface. I already own a Presonus Firepod. Its a little old one (6 years approx) but I already own it and want to implement it here. But I am concerned about seperating the audio outs..I want that and I am not sure how well I can do that with a 6 yr old Firepod. Maybe its easy..I just dont know. It will feed my Mackie PA head (808). With seperate bass,keys drum channels. Each can be EQ'd etc
To back up a bit: I record my own arrangements. So I will be putting down bass, keys,drum samples and any instrument needed. So it REALLY needs to be a flexible platform. And in Rock/Pop stuff I think this all spells DAW (Cubase 5 on PC)in my mind.
Your thoughts???
GtrGeorge