I’ve used Cantabile for a show and it worked great, solid as a rock and all round great!
This was a show where the music cues never changed and were always in the same order and I was just using one master keyboard to control it.
I’ve also worked out how to set up with 2 keyboards to have songs in a setlist with specific song setups (ooh get me!) this is great for bands and shows where I have specific needs for each song.
Now, what I’m wondering is possible is the times where you’re just sitting in with a band or a jam where you need, on the 2 keyboard setup to just be able (like you can if you’re using the internal sounds of the boards) to select a sound individually from each keyboard for example to keep a piano sound on the bottom one and change from brass to strings to hammond on the top one?
I realise I could set up a song for each combination ie
Piano/Strings
Piano/Brass
Piano/Organ
Rhodes/Strings
Rhodes/Brass
Rhodes/Hammond
etc…
But obviously, this then becomes a lot of songs/rack states (if that’s the way you’d do it!) once you’ve got even 5-6 sounds for each keyboard…
Hope this makes sense as to what I’m trying to achieve…
For a scenario like this, I’d suggest setting up two racks - upper and lower. Then create bindings to control rack state for both racks separately via controllers / buttons…
Of course, these racks will become more complex, because you have to all possible sounds for the lower keyboard into one rack. But if you keep your ad-hoc-setup somewhat lean (Piano, Rhodes, Wurly for lower, Organ, Strings, Brass, Solo Synth for upper), you can manage the bread’n butter for most ad-hoc sessions.
You can also do it without any racks or states, only with bindings which enable or disable midi routes. The advanteage of this is, that you will be able to layer sounds, for example Piano + Strings on the lower and Organ + Lead on the upper.
If you don’t have enough buttons on your keyboard, you can check out my thread Singlepress, Doublepress and Modifier Keys.
Another variant is to have one rack for each keyboard (upper/lower), but instead of containing all the plugins, their job is just to route MIDI notes/controllers to your chosen other racks. The states of those racks represent routing configurations, including splits, layers etc. So basically a hybrid of @Torsten’s and @Siggin0er’s approaches.
Similar to what @Neil_Durant said, I have a rack that takes the MIDI input from one or two keyboards (MIDI Device Top_Keyboard and Bottom_Keyboard) and routes them as splits or layers to Main_Keyboard(Default) using Loopback-Main_Keyboard. Then I can have 2 keyboards or a single keyboard with splits, etc. using Rack States. The only trick was making sure each song had routings that would handle split, layer, or separate keyboards.
Not having played with bindings much, can you set them so that program changes rather than assignable MIDI controller buttons do the sound/rack state/etc changing. I say this because the boards I use live are not controller keyboards, I use an RD-700GX and a Kurzweil PC3K.
the first binding is to load a song state, the second is to load a song from the set list using a program change number. There are also bindings from prog chg to rack states. Hope this helps.
