“Phil’s got this pedal board – like, an old guitar pedal board, with 8 different switches on. He says he thinks it is used to change effects on a stomp-box or something. It has MIDI outputs on it. Anyway, he wants to be able to play his guitar and use this thing to fire loops, samples, sound effects and stuff. Problem is, when he plugs the MIDI into our drummer’s MPC, all it does is change the preset. Seems a shame to chuck it out – how can we make it trigger samples?”

Any ideas?

plug it into a sampler......

I will relay that message dad, thanks.

Bust out the manual for the MPC and whatever your pedal-device is. Check the CC values and see what values will trigger the samples on the MPC, and what the pedalboard will send. Assign the appropriate values if possible. It'll take some editing, but it might/should be do-able. It's really dependent more on the pedalboard than the MPC; that should be easily controllable from an external unit.

We're attempting to do the same thing with a beater Behringer FCB1010, a Roland SP-555, and a DMX light controller. We've determined it's best if the drummer has control over it, but we want the 'puter at front-of-house with our tech, not somewhere the monitor can get bashed in.