Similar to the other thread, how do you rapidly move to songs throughout your set list when they can’t be pre-ordered? Our band tends to take set lists as general suggestions (it’s a long-term problem. We’re in band therapy for it), so no matter how ahem well-crafted and polished the setlists are at the beginning of the show, I’ll be scrambling by the 5th song to load while the guitarist has already started playing a different tune.
I have all of the tunes in a master list, but my tiny touchscreen monitor has been so far uninspiring. Seems like having one button targeted to manually advance songs could take a long time to jump from the top of the list to the bottom, but I don’t really want to have to put a mouse on stage with me.
How do you jump around your set list when necessary?
You do not say how long your set list is, but I have a Roland FC300 MIDI foot controller programmed to send patch changes for each song, which Cantabile can listen out for and select the right song. It is quite easy then to find the song and select it with your feet (why God gave musicians feet! )
The alternative would be a touch screen monitor and set the Setlist to show a grid mode, which hopefully will give you a grid of buttons to make the selection easier to scroll and find.
Thanks, Derek-- I’ve got about 90 that I need to have at quick access, so something like the foot controller is possible. Just to clarify, you have each FC300 program sending a different program change command to C3. Those program change messages are all programmed into the foot controller directly? And then I’m guessing the song change bindings are in your background rack?
My preferred method is to have a preloaded setlist with my complete repertoire (for a project / band), alphabetically sorted, in Cantabile sitting somewhere backstage and LivePrompter on a tablet on my keyboard sending program changes to Cantabile. Scrolling through a list of songs in LivePrompter is easy, so whenever we decide to deviate from the set list, I can easily accomodate without touching my Cantabile setup.
Without using LivePrompter, my recommendations would be to similarly keep the full repertoire on Cantabile and use different means to select a song:
classic variant: send program changes from a number pad on your master keyboard, with a printed list (song - number) on the keyboard - no need to touch the Cantabile machine
Cantabile variant: use the grid view to scroll and find your song, possible on a touch screen, as @Derek recommended - requires you to have your Cantabile machine in reach
I have used to have the bindings as you describe in the background rack, but as I am working on a few different set lists, I moved to having a linked rack for each set list. That has all the bindings and you just drop the rack in each song, which makes the set list self contained.
As Torsten says,you could do similar with patch changes from your main board. the reason why I favour foot pedals is that often I need to change patches (or Cantabile states) mid song whilst both hands are on the keyboard for some songs. So I decided to have a uniform means of patch selection for all songs via foot controller.
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