MPC 500 and midi trigger pads (for drum sticks)

Hi. Ive been asked my a friend whos in a band to find this out:

They want a sampler to play drum hits, loops and other samples such as string samples. They also want to be able to trigger some of the samples with drum sticks.

Is this possible firstly?

Also, what would i need to trigger MPC samples with drum sticks?

Thanks, Ben

you could probably do it if they got a midi drum set, like those electronic ones and midi that to your mpc then you could trigger the mpc sounds from the midi drum kit.

The pads are a bit too small to accurately hit with a drum stick I think. You could get an MPC along with something like the Alesis Performance Pad, which has 8 much larger pads with MIDI control to trigger the MPC samples, or maybe a foot controller like the Yamaha MFC10 might be just as easy to use for a drummer?

Hey. Thanks, thats great. Do you know how easy it is to program samples to the alesis performance pad. eg. out of hundreds of samples, how to get the kick on the left, the snare on the top left, the crash on the right etc? Is it easy to do that just being plugged in via midi to the mpc500?

Thanks again, Ben

Would be v easy, assign what midi note is transmitted by each pad on the alesis, and assign whatever sample you want to that midi note on the mpc.

Yea. but can you have different pad banks on the alesis. For example the 8 pads control the first 8 sounds and the next bank on the alesis controls the next 8 sounds? If not, do you have to stick to just using the first 8 sounds on the mpc. I know that some mpcs arent programmed chromatically eg- the pad a1, a2, a3 and a4 arent c, csharp, d, d sharp, they are out of order. I want to make sure that the alesis will work correctly and wont be a pain to set up and use?

Am i making myself clear?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks, Ben

I don't have the alesis performance. However, if you can select banks on the alesis then that would not be a problem, assuming you don't run out of sampling points on the mpc (12 pads x 4 banks = 48 samples). You can assign any sample you like to any midi note on the mpc and once you save the program to your memory card you can recall this program as required.

Hi, I have the setup you are asking about using a Yamaha DD65 drum pad and an MPC-500. You do have to midimap the sounds you want to trigger, but, yes, you can store different banks with different sounds. it works great since the Yamaha DD65 actually has 2 foot pedals for kick and highhats.

apricotandpearjam wrote:Hi. Ive been asked my a friend whos in a band to find this out:

They want a sampler to play drum hits, loops and other samples such as string samples. They also want to be able to trigger some of the samples with drum sticks.

Is this possible firstly?

Also, what would i need to trigger MPC samples with drum sticks?

Thanks, Ben