Ive been mixing on an mpc1000 and i seem to have run into a wall. My internal memory on the mpc is 256mb. 12 min of stereo time and 24 of mono. In reality i can only load up about 10 or 11 beats for a live set but thats not enough.
Ive noticed when i go to shows and artists are using sp404's, they seem to pull off a 45 minute set with countless tracks.

Are they making tracks on their computer and loading the wav.file onto their Sp?

And how big is the internal memory on it?

Please, someone help me out because this has been boggling my mind for some time now.

- Thanks

It accepts a 1 GB card (404 SX even more I believe). Its at least over 350 minutes of audio. A lot of people will load up whole songs and just drop effects on em.

Yeah the Sp series has amazing amounts of storage space and versatility live, especially the newer ones. There's also the huge bonus over the mpc series that was a deal breaker for me - the samples don't have loading times at all, ever, because they are stored in flash media, not in ram. I have an sp-404 and it can have 1gb memory max but the newer sp-404sx can have much bigger cards as can the sp-555 I believe. And yeah, they're probably loading the entire wave files of the songs onto pads and then having other sounds and samples loaded on adjacent pads to add throughout the show as they see fit. You could also load up the pads with a few like stems per pad (a pad that has the vocals, a pad for the bass and drums, a pad for the main piano sample with your string hit, etc...). This would give you a a lot more versaitility and options when using fx and other stuff on your beats while also taking up less space than putting each stem on its own pad. If organized right, I think you could get a solid 1.5-2 hours at least out of a big memory card in something like a sp-404sx or an sp-555.

Yeah it seems like they do. Thanks for tips though. This makes me want an sp404sx.

www.soundcloud.com/gypsy-beatz

By the way Adambomb, you have some clean tracks