I've got a Yamaha S03 that I'm finally getting good with to play a little with the band. There are only a few presets/patches that I use most of the time. But it's difficult to navigate to them using the on-board cursor keys, and nearly impossible to do it in real time while playing.
What I'd like to be able to do is change the patches on the fly to my favorites. Ideally I'd like to have some software running on my PC to select the ones I want. Tonight I got the new version of XGWorks Lite that actually works in WinXP, I think it might do what I want, but it looks a little cumbersome.
I finally managed to get control over the S03 using a program called Midi-Ox, http://www.midiox.com/. It's a little overkill, but it works like a charm - shows the MIDI messages transmitted in each direction, knows the standard XG settings, etc. It also lets you save your favorite patch/bank settings in a folder. It's a real nice diagnostic tool, bet it could come in real handy if you had multiple MIDI devices connected.
I'd still like to have a little simpler program optimized as a controller only.
Have you tried saving your fav patches/settings as performances? Obviously there's still some scrolling, but at least you have 32 slots to easily arrange to your requirements, and in the order you usually need them. You might even repeat a couple of patches in there, to arrange two or three in a group for different songs. Then you only have to scroll up or down 2 shots at most during any one tune. You could even get a midi foot controller to make it faster (ala guitar or vocal live effects).
I'm looking forward to trying out the software you linked. I honestly hate my S03 - but it really is a great bang-for-buck beginner board, and I'd like to get more use out of it.
Thanks for the suggestions. Not exactly sure what you mean by "performances"... unless you mean the user presets. That's kinda what I was trying to get around, I'd like to be able to just jump around instead of having only sequential access through all the memory slots. I guess most peeps do this with hardware controller for live work. A guy on another forum suggested I get 6 each S03's and stack em all around!
Think I'll try to get my business partner (the software dude) to write me a simple MIDI controller program that doesn't do anything else. One with BIG icons for each song setting, that I can step through with maybe arrow keys... hmmmm.
I'm a newbie to keys - actually bought the S03 for the old lady for Xmas before last, she never played it, so I inherited it. (Kinda nice how that worked out actually). Last fall I managed to get what I think is tednonitis in the left forearm, so I've been trying to leave the gittar alone and finally learn some keys. Having a lot of fun at it, actually can play some chords and improvise over blues progressions a little now. Got a lot to learn though - hope all of you more experienced folks cope well with dumb newbie questions.
