There’s nothing “wrong” per se with loading one big rack in every song, but it’s a bit unflexible in putting together your songs.
I have dozens of racks that I use in my songs - mostly for different instruments, so I have an acoustic piano rack, a Wurly rack, a Rhodes rack, a string layer rack, a pad synth rack, a couple of solo synth racks, my favorite two virtual sax racks etc…
Each of these racks has different rack states - think of them as “presets” for a synth. So my acoustic piano rack may have different states like “Rock piano”, “Ballad piano”, “Solo Piano”, …; same with all other racks.
Now for any given song, I string together strictly the racks (i.e. “instruments”) I need in this specific song - for a plain piano song, I may simply need one acoustic piano rack, with possibly a string layer rack in addition. For a massive Pink Floyd arrangement, I may need a dozen of different instruments (piano, organ, pads, string machine, lead synth, sound effects from a sampler), so these songs will get complex.
The good thing is that since I have all my instruments wrapped in re-useable racks, the piano rack that is used both in the plain piano song AND the Pink Floyd arrangement will only be loaded once. And, since all my racks (“instruments”) are loaded at the beginning of the set list, loading any given song will be pretty quick.
This makes building your songs pretty easy and efficient - especially when you build your songs from a number of different “colors” - I have a couple of racks (acoustic piano, electric piano, organs) that get used in most of my songs, but a couple of others just get pulled in occasionally when I need that sound (e.g. virtual sax).
I’ll post pictures of some songs when I’m back at my music machine.
Hope things start making sense…
Cheers,
Torsten
- similar approach here. I have four “rehearsal songs”:
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