Need Advice - Does such a thing exist?

[mineralman]

Does such a thing exist?

We are a small 3 piece band that play using 3 synths, a Yamaha csx1, Micro Korg, and an Alesis Micron along with a Boss 505 groove workstation/ drum machine. We are all from a more traditional instrument background, guitars, bass, drums etc, so we are very much learning the possibilities of our new equipment and we go along. At first we would use basic beats from the Boss and play the other instruments over the top, using midi sync for arrpegiators etc.

However we have increasingly been turning to LOGIC to create our backing tracks and drums beats as we find it a far more immediate and creative tool. Only thing is our backing tracks are now becoming more complex. The problem then becomes playing them live.

We don't have enough hands between us to play with the Boss 505 on stage, so we have been chopping up our Logic compositions into segments and loading them onto the Boss as patterns to build the songs. That way we can basically press 'play', and play along, but still be able to sync our keyboards to the midi signal coming from the Boss. However that process is incredibly time consuming, and you are limited to a pattern of 8 measures in length on the Boss. It take hours and hours to transport the backing tracks onto it, and then if you want to make any changes you have to start again.

So far our best solution is to have laptop onstage playing the logic sequences and sending a midi sync using a USB-Midi converter. However we are trying to get away from having to rely a computer onstage, as the only laptop we can use for this we have to borrow from somebody else.

Is the there any piece of hardware out there where you can load a song out of logic in it's entirety (either as a bounced down PCM file or otherwise), that can play it back and still output a midi sync clock, so we can still play along live with arrpegiators etc? It would need to have enough storage or capacity to hold 6 or 7 songs, or have a card slot or similar?

I've heard that patterns in the Akai MPC range are not limited to a set length and can be as long as you need. But will it be capable to do what i'm suggesting? I'm not sure there would be enough storage?

Help! Does anybody have any suggestions?

[elektro80]

Didn´t Roland/Boss have some devices that could store and output midi files?

Possibly this thing could do it?
http://www.edirol.com/forums.html/en/products-mainmenu-421/visual-performance-mainmenu-384/p-1


Or not..

[mineralman]

Thanks for this, although the link doesn't seem to work.

Thing is, lots of our backing tracks my have audio files already within them, samples etc. Not purely midi data.

I found this? but I don't really have the tech knowledge to work out if it will do what we need it do do? Plus it almost costs as much as buy a second hand laptop!

http://www.rolandsg.co.uk/forums.html?option=com_content&task=view&id=95

[elmacaco]

MPC 1000 can do that easily.

And a whole lot more.

[Atomic Shadow]

The Elektron Octatrack will do all of that when it comes out in a few months. They keep saying it will be available in the 4th quarter of 2010.

64 Gig compact flash card slot, 4 analog inputs, 8 tracks of audio and an internal sequencer.