Something important to remember with the MPC 2500 is that it can ONLY SEND OUT MULTIPLE MIDI CHANNELS. It can not receive multiple MIDI channels like a muiti-timbral work station. If MIDI is sent to the MPC is will only trigger the currently selected track. Keep this in mind, especially when bouncing.
This is the reason that all MIDI sequences should be done in the MPC and sent out from there.
First you need to make sure that the MPC, MIDI keyboard controller, and Logic can all send MIDI to and from one another. You should be able to send MIDI from your controller, and record the MIDI data in the MPC. The MPC track you record on should be set to "MIDI" and assigned to whatever channel your plugin is set to. And the plugin in Logic should be "Armed" to record or you won't hear any sound from it. Every additional plugin should have it's own MIDI channel in logic and the same MIDI channel in the MPC. You're not concerned about the MPC and Logic syncing at this point. You just want to make sure all your MIDI is routed right and you are getting results that you expect. In addition you should also be able to play the pads on the MPC and have the plugin assigned to that MIDI channel trigger a sound. You should be able to sequence everything in the MPC now. Just make sure you plugins are armed(R) and have their own MIDI channel and that channel should be the same as the channel in the MPC. Make sure all of this is working before moving on.
One you have "banged out some heat" and your sequencing is done on the MPC you have to get all that into Logic. Here is when you need to sync the MPC to Logic. Logic will be the Master and MPC the Slave,it works better this way. You can refer to that link now (
http://www.akaipro.com/synclogic)it will walk you through it. It's really simple. Make sure your MPC and Logic have the same BPM as well VERY IMPORTANT.
At this point some people go straight to tracking out audio. I would to if I had enough simultaneous audio ins to handle everything, but I don't. And I don't trust MTC timing enough for tracking out individually. So to save having to manually align the audio tracks I put all MIDI from my MPC into Logic. There are a few ways to do this, but Ill show the two fastest.
1. If your Logic project is set up at 44.1khz then you can save you MPC sequence as a MIDI file and use your USB cable to get the MIDI data to your Mac. It will look like one file, but when you open it in Logic it will all seperate out in to the seperate tracks you created on you MPC.
I can't use this method because I record at 88.2khz. I tried it before and everything was off between the MIDI file and my logic project and I got a sync error. This is because the MPC only records at 44.1khz. So here's what I do
2. I create external MIDI tracks in logic and assign MIDI channels that match the tracks on my MPC. ALL TRACKS (including the channels for the plugins). Keep in mind that Logic is Master and the MPC is slave. In Logic I go to Project Settings>Recording and check "auto demix by channel if multitrack recording". What that does is automatically separates the MIDI data per channel, similar to the first method. It's all done in one pass. Let the loop repeat a couple of times before stopping the recording. This makes sure Logic and the MPC are locked in on the timing sync. Now, out of the MIDI data recorded, select a portion a few loops in to set your loop markers.
Double check the MIDI and make sure everything looks lined up. With the MIDI data in Logic you can now move the MIDI regions to the appropriate plugin and it will play as it did in the MPC. But remember, the MPC will only play the track that is selected on the MPC screen. If you hit play in logic your Plugins will play fine , but the MPC will sound like a mess. So you must bounce 1 track at a time from the MPC.
Solo the MPC MIDI track in Logic and make sure the same track is on the screen of your MPC. Arm an Audio track for recording and press record. Proceed to record 1 track at a time.
And this is how I do it. I'm sure there may be tons of other ways to get this done, and it's a bit of a process so I would love to hear any other methods. The only reason I was willing to type all of this out is because when I was researching this I was unable to find a complete walk through.
A couple of things to mention is that at some point during the process you may need to go into your sync mode menu on the MPC and set active track from all to 16 (or some other track not being used). I can't remember exactly the case for doing this, but if you hit a wall and things are acting funny try that. I beleive it's during the tracking out process. Also I didn't go through the whole setting up of MIDI instruments in Logic. If you just have an MPC it may not be necessary though. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction.
This is the main reason I've been looking at Maschine over the past couple of months. I don't know what I'm waiting on. lol