Ok; here's the thing. I bought an SP-555 and it's not quite doing what I wanted and I was hoping for some gear recommendations from you guys. I'd prefer a hardware device to a laptop.

I want to bring live sampling to an electro/rock band; more specifically I want to have a line-in from my guitar player's rig, sample phrases of his performance live and loop it, then tweak the made-on-the-fly loops. All musicians are synced to the same MIDI clock the stuff I sample from my guitarist can't slip, cuz if it slips then it's slippin'.

Problem is SP-555's "Loop Capture" seemed ideal for this, and is why I bought the damn thing, but Loop Capture doesn't sync with the BPM or MIDI clock (!) and eventually loses sync. Plus that whole "Save to pad button stops playback" problem really turned me off.

So - what I'm looking for:

-Ability to record samples during playback, loop them, tweak them, stay in MIDI sync.

Can the Korg ESX-1 pull this off, do y'all know? Thanks in advance for your help, any other gear recommendations are welcome and encouraged.

I was looking for something like this for a long time and gave up trying to find a synced looper (for cheap). You aren't going to find a sampler that does this well, the 555 is definitely the closest choice. An ESX-1 definitely won't do it either. You'll want to look at loop pedals - maybe the EHX 2880 looper. This solution wasn't suitable for me because it only recorded loops in 4/4 time. My dream pedals were either the Gibson Echoplex or the Electrix Repeater.

The Looperlative LP-2 pedal that was just announced at Namm is probably perfect for this purpose and they are only going to be around 250 dollars. It is a small pedal that syncs at whatever time signature you want.

In the end, the best solution you're going to find is Ableton Live. I understand not wanting to use a computer though. I never did, which is why I simply re-envisioned what I was trying to do live and set it up differently.

Hmm...maybe the korg microsampler? I'm pretty sure from a video I watched it can record samples during playback. I don't know how good it's effects are though.

Aaaaah. After watching the demo, the Korg Microsampler may be the thing. Partcularly that "Key Gate" mode. That's EXACTLY what I'm after, or maybe even a little beyond. Thanks tons!

I also realized a workaround. On further thought. I could trigger SP-555 samples from a couple channels on my Korg EMX-1. Thing is the SP-555 would begin the set with the pads vacant. As samples are recorded live, they would then trigger from the EMX-1 repeatedly, instead of via loop capture, and not lose sync. Technically I guess the 555 wouldn't need to be in on the MIDI chain at all, with this setup.

Keep the suggestions coming, though, this is great stuff!

Kaoss pad 3?

Very limited sample time IMO...

sure, but the looping is the best

i recommend using an RC-50, which has midi sync.

or move away from that, use an RC-20xl.

interesting combos would include the guitarist's fx loop signal passing thru a small mixer with its bus piped to the looper, or passed through the looper and into an sp-555 before being sent back to the board.

In my humble opinion, that's the way to go. There's no way you can keep the flexibility of a sampler editing loops and doing tweaks, without saving in between before you can feed it back into the 'live' situation (unless you use several pieces of gear and a mixer and so on).

I think a common looper pedal will be more useful for live overdubbing than any sampler though. What exactly do you want to do with a loop, except for feeding it back into the live show again?

I think you'll run into conceptual issues here, unrelated to gear.

Hah! Exactly what I planned on doing with the loop? I would have to catch one first to know for sure! But I was thinking mostly tweaking, processing, and generally rendering loops abrasive, particularly subjecting it to the SP-555's DJFX Looper was interesting to me. That and bitcrush. Lots of bitcrush.

But the RC-50 into a mixer's bus does indeed seem like the most logical choice, though I read a review (http://www.fretbase.com/blog/2009/02/boss-rc-50-loopstation-flawed-but-glorious/) stating that the RC-50, while it will receive MIDI Start/stop, doesn't handle sync all that well either. Still, I could drop the whole MIDI sync issue and just stick to Loop Quantize....

Thanks much to all who offered suggestions.

...I love my SP-404, BUT for capturing loops on the fly, the KP3 is AWESOME... so much fun to slice the beats live, as well...

A trick I use to double my sampling time is half the BPM...if the song is 120, set the KP3 for 60, thereby doubling the amount of time you have to sample...

I'm considering a MPC500 purely for the fact it's cheaper than a 555 and it's got velocity sensitive pads(the 404 does not.)

Any suggestions y'all?