Midi events

[Henrik]

Hello,
I'm looking into buying a hardware sequencer for live use. All manufacturers rate how many events their sequencers can store in the internal memory. For instance the Roland MC50 can store 40,000 events.

But I wonder what that means precisely. First - do both note on and note off count as an event (so hitting and releasing a key uses up two events)? But more interesting: Say you have a drum sequence that takes up 40 events. If you play that 50 times in a song, is the memory used still 40 events (plus the used memory for the information that the machine should repeat the sequence), or is it 40x50 events=2000 events?

Thanks
/Henrik

[robsmusic]

Note on and note off are 2 midi events.
Continuous controllers (pitch bend and mod wheel, etc) use multiple events depending on the amount and length.

On most sequencers, a looped 40 event passage would still use only 40 events, regardless of the number of times it is looped.
If the passage is recorded linearly, or copied and pasted to make a longer passage, then the number of events would increase. So, to use your example, a 40 event passage pasted 50 times in a row would create 1 passage of 2000 events.

HTH,
-Rob

[Henrik]

Great, thanks! That's what I thought.

Cheers
/Henrik