New to MPC terms and need help to decide my future!

Hi!

I am looking for a nice machine to take the place of a missing drummer in my band! (The town I'm living in has far to few of those!) At first I was looking at drum machines only but then someone told me to get an MPC and especially take a look at the MPC1000.

And now I'm here!

The thing is that I'm having trouble comparing the specifications of the drum machines I have been looking at, and the MPC's. While the other machines use "patterns" to describe the number of 16- or 32-step patterns that you can save on the machine the MPC seem to use the term "sequences". And that puzzles me. Is the MPC really limited to 99 traditional "patterns"?
And what does the term "step" mean? The AKAI website says a song can hold up to 250 steps, which makes it clear that a "step" is not the same as a "step" on a drum machine. Or?

Can someone help me understand this? I'm feeling very confused, even for a newbie. =)

As I mentioned above, I plan to use the MPC1000 (or whatever I will buy) to play the drums in my band, which is a pop band with many variations in the drums - thus the need for a large pattern-storage (or sequence, he he, you knwo what I mean... I hope). Most of the other machines I've been looking at have a pretty poor storage, but if I understand this right and the MPC has only 99 then this is the lowest number I've seen so far! How on earth can that be enough for anyone?

Finally, I'd like some opinions on using the MPC1000 to program pop music and not only electronic music and hip-hop. Of course, my songs have some electro in 'em but, unlike most electronic genres, they are full of fills and variations and I need a machine that can playback all of these without having a band member controlling it!

Is the MPC1000 something for me?! I definitly would like a sampler as drum machine since I like the ability to use whatever sounds I like, but in the end it really comes up to what features, functions and storage capacity the sequencer has. It is possible, though I'd like to avoid it, to use a machine with lower quality sounds, but it's certainly impossible for me to use a machine that's only capable of holding just a few songs. I simply cannot cut down on the variations in the drums either! They are important to our sound and can't be compromised. =(

GAH, long post with lots of newbie questions... I hope someone has the time to read it through and give a poor Swedish musician some help in deciding the future of his band!

Thanks!

99 is just what you can load at one time, the cf storage means you can have many sets of 99on the card.

A sequence can be 2 bars, 16 bars, 32 bars, 128 bars, whatever. You can have all your breaks and stuff in one long sequence or you can have various sequences chained together into songs, say an 8 bar sequence or into, then another sequence at 16 bars for the chorus, a different sequence of 16 for the verse, etc. Steps is for song mode, where you have 250 steps, each step is one sequence, where you can assign an 8, 16, 32, or 128 (or more ) bar sequence and it counts as one step. when that ends it will go to the next step and play the assigned sequence for step 2.

You can also assign repeats per step, so your first step can repeat a few times before going to the next sequence without eating another step.

the 1000 kills most stand alone drum machines in its sleep.

Yes, the MPC 1000 is right for you.

Oh my, this sound lovely =P

So if I have a song which consists of, let's say 10 different sequences. That doesn't mean I only have 89 left for other songs? Just that that particular song only can use up to 99 sequences to organize in the song-mode?

yup.

Ok. =)

I've never used any MPC's before, or samplers either so I still have a few silly questions to ask! =D

Just making sure I got everything right.

The MPC itself can store 99 sequences that I can arrange in song mode the way I like. But I can store alot more sequences on the CF card and bring 'em into the MPC when I need to load another song.

Can I reach the CF card quickly to get the sequences needed for other songs? Or is it a complicated process? Since I'm going to use it live I don't have time to mess around to much with menues and buttons... =(

You've got a couple options on how to handle it. 1st, you can have up to 20 songs in memory at one time (that are made up of the 99 sequences, etc).

Also, you can have an AutoLoad directory on each CF card. So when an MPC turns on, it will load anything in that directory. So, if you had more than 1 CF card (say 1 for each set, or 20 songs, or whatever), you could just turn off the MPC, insert new card, turn it back on. no punching buttons.

You can dump sequences from memory, then jump to a directory, and load in all new ones. That's pretty easy to do, and should take you less than 10 seconds once you understand the interface, which is very fast & easy to use.