One feature of some keyboards is that if you hold the foot pedal down while changing sounds the current sound holds on until the foot pedal is released even after changing sound.
So e. G. hold strings… Press sustain and hold down… Change bank / program to another sound and string sound still holding… Start playing new sound.e.g. Ep… String still holds until sustain release.
Or finishing with a piano sound and want to smoothly change to an electric piano or pad sound. There is an interrupt at least with the way in doing it.
I do this all the time with Cantabile. The trick is for the second sound to be already set up on a different MIDI channel, and instead of doing a bank/program change, you do a MIDI channel change. The result is super-smooth changes without having to worry about any glitch, or critical switch timing. In fact unless I have no alternative, I never send program changes mid-song - I have all my sounds set up across 16 MIDI channels. The only exception is where a song requires more than 16 different sounds, but then it’s always easy to find a suitable place to change sounds so the change won’t be heard.
I have another approach to achieve that. For example, i have two different plugins which all receive on midi channel one from the same keyboard. what I do on switching song states is, that i enable or disable the midi routes to that plugins. First state = midi routing to plugin #2 disabled, second state = midi routing to plugin #1 disabled. So I don’t have to set different midi channels for my plugins.
Previous answers pretty much cover it, but a couple of notes:
Most plugins won’t handle keeping an old sound running while switching to a new preset - so preset switching in the plugin is nearly always out of the question and Cantabile can’t really help here.
Cantabile’s MIDI routes will send the release events for held notes and pedals to the old target even if the target changes or the route is disabled.
For this to work while switching songs, the MIDI routes need to be setup directly from the environment ports to the plugin in the rack. ie: not via the rack’s MIDI in ports. The reason for this is when a song is closed all held notes in the racks are automatically release to prevent stuck notes.
