PC88 Made Easy
21. Switching Programs on External Slaves without Playing
Them
If you are performing and have two keyboards, you might run into a situation where you
playing each keyboard separately (that is, each keyboard is playing its own sound), but
you need to be able to quickly change the sounds on both keyboards. In this case, you
can create a Setup on the PC88 which will switch the sounds on your other keyboard,
but wonÕt send any MIDI note data to it. This is easily done.
This tutorial also shows an example of copying a zone from one Setup to another.
1.
Press MIDI Setups, then 128 then Enter. You have called up A Clear Setup. Press
Copy, then Enter. You have now copied a zone from this Setup into the edit buffer.
2.
Press the MIDI Setups, then 127, then Enter. You have called up Default Setup. Press
Copy, Press the >> button. The Display should now say ÒPaste into zone 1?Ó. Press the
Zone 2 button, then Enter. (The display will say ÒZone pastedÓ, then revert back to
ÒPaste into zone 2?Ó.)You have now pasted all the parameter values from zone 1 of
Setup 128 into zone 2 of Setup 127.
3.
Press the MIDI Transmit button. Set the MIDI channels that you want for zones 1 and
2. Press the >> button. Set zone 1 to Local and zone 2 to MIDI.
4.
Press the Program button and choose the programs that you want for zones 1 and 2.
5.
Make sure that the display is on zone 2. Press the Key Range button. Press the >>
button twice to get to the Note Map parameter. Press 0, then Enter to set it to Off.
6.
Name and Save your Setup.
Now when you call up the Setup, it will send a program change to your external
keyboard, but since the note map for that zone is turned off, no note information is sent
to the external keyboard when you play the PC88.
Why did we go to the trouble of copying and pasting zones? Even though the keyboard
isnÕt sending any notes on that zone, any controller messages will still be sent. For
example, Switch Pedal 1 is assigned to Sustain in all zones in the Default Setup. So if
you simply edited zone 2 of the Default Setup, then when you stepped on that pedal,
you would be sending sustain messages to the external keyboard in addition to the
PC88, which you probably donÕt want. So you would need to go to the various
Controller parameters and assign the Control Number (for continuous controllers) and
On Control (for switch controllers) to None. In Setup 127, the two wheels and two
switch pedals are set to values other than None, so those would be the ones you want to
edit. Rather than go through the steps of unassigning those four controllers for zone 2,
we imported a zone from A Clear Setup, which has the all the controllers set to None.
The techniques above could also be used to send program changes to other devices, such
as effects processors, etc. without sending any other info to them.
You can also use the same technique for zones assigned to the PC88 itself! LetÕs say you
have two keyboards. On the PC88 keyboard, you want to play an internal program or
