Buying a 500

Going to go with a 500. I narrowed it down to an XR20 or the 500 and the 500 is more velocity sensitive. Anything I should know before I take the plunge? I just want something to bang on. Has to be portable too. I know the 500 is cryptic but nothing is perfect.

Make sure to buy the fat pads if you want to bang on the mpc500. They improve the sensitivity dramatically. The XR20 has some cool sounds, but a lot of the synth sounds are cheese. The XR20 also seems to eat up batteries a lot quicker. Have sets of nimh batteries on deck. 500's are great machines if you make the best of them.

Thanks. Might try Guitar Center or Ebay.

cryptic! But you right, things are scrambled up but its actually easyto get around once you familarize yourself.

I have both and the XR20 is velocity sensative and 12 pads, only difference is that the XR is a drum machine and the MPC is a sampler. The smart move would to get the 500 and load it up with XR20 sounds to have both worlds in one

Well I finally have a 500 coming from ebay. Has everything except the extra ram. Any tips on using/storing sounds from the CF card? I assume it stores midi files, wave files, samples, etc...

I'm a longtime FL Studio user so I have tons of sounds for that. 909, 808, Hip hop, etc.. Can you just load them as waves on the CF card and leave it in all the time?

YES.

love my 500!!

Got the 500 and everything seems to be OK. Looks unused. Got some cheap RAM, 128 MB but haven't installed yet. The CF card it came with is only 128 MB (Akai) so I'm thinking get this;

http://www.amazon.com/Akai-CompactFlash ... rd+mpc+500

Sound right?

I've got that one and it works fine. For some reason the Akai branded CF card feels more legit. I know, it's all in my mind.

Well I got a 2GB Akai CF card and a card reader. Now, I"M GOING TO RACK MY BRAIN WITH TUTORIALS!..

Do the pads loosen up on these machines? I'm guessing they do. Anyway, I'm going to start looking for sounds..

I want to sample some guitar, and maybe some other things so I'm thinking of getting this thing;

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/ ... MgodHxEAbw