Switching Programs on External Slaves without Playing Them

This tutorial also shows an example of copying a zone from one Setup to another.

1. Press MIDI Setups, then 127 then Enter. You have called up 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 128, then Enter. You have called up Default Setup. Press Copy, Press the >> button. The Display should now say “Paste into zone 1?”. Press the Zone 2 button, then Enter. (The display will say “Zone pasted”, then revert back to “Paste into zone 2?”.)You have now pasted all the parameter values from zone 1 of Setup 127 into zone 2 of Setup 128.

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. If you need to set a bank number for a zone, press the << to get to the Bank parameter. Then you can return to the Program parameter and select the program number. 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 PC2.

Why did we go to the trouble of copying and pasting zones? Even though the keyboard isn’t 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 PC2, which you probably don’t 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 128, wheel 1 and all three 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 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 PC2 itself! Let’s say you have two keyboards. On the PC2 keyboard, you want to play an internal program or programs (up to three). On your external keyboard, you want to play its own sounds and ALSO play a program from the PC2. But your external keyboard doesn’t have the abilities the PC2 has for calling up different programs. So you create a zone in the PC2 Setup to call up the internal sound you want, but set the Note Map for that zone to Off. So when you call up the Setup, it chooses the PC2 sound you want to be played from the external keyboard, but the PC2 keyboard won’t play that zone.

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