Midi foot pedal board and ?

[phillm47]

I'm a bass player in a four piece band consisting of guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Finding a keyboard player has not been successful for us. In an attempt to fill out the sound of our band, I am considering picking up a midi pedal board, like a Roland PK-5, and compatible keyboard. What I would like to accomplish is to be able to fill out the sound of the band on sevral songs with single sustained notes, some chords, or sustained polyphonic sounds (strings?), maybe some sampled background vocal sounds.

Forgive a noobie here: From what I understand, just about any midi keyboard is going to let me use this pedal board as a controller - single notes and monophonic sounds. But what do I need in a keyboard to allow me to map and trigger, say a polyphonic tone, such as a chord (polyphonic string type sound)? I assume I would need something that had sampling capability to do any type of background vocal type sound, no? What should one look for in a keyboard? Thing to consider is:

1) this is for live use
2) ease of programming or setup is a plus
3) I think I would like a keyboard over a synth module; there would be times where I may be filling live on the keyboard without playing my bass (song intros, bridges...etc)
4) I don't have thousands of dollars at my disposal.

Any suggestions? :confused:

Thanks :)

[TimOBrien]

I can do this with my Roland SPD-S (about $500 new)

In fact, the SPD-S comes with demos like this
and you can load new .wav files right in using the CompactFlash card
(you can even use it to make samples with a microphone).