It sure makes a difference. I never got the hang of the hand signals, esp when there where 7 vocalists and four guitars (two players, but also acoustic and pedal steel), drums, bass, keys, backing!
I may be looking at an analog(ish) synth later in the year, can’t say why other than GAS and a work bonus coming along 
, and will be looking at the Prophet, but the new Novation Peak also looks quite interesting, so I guess I will b checking a few out.
Love the duct tape ornamentation! 
I’ve been watching the PK-5a for sale on Reverb and ebay. It looks like the right bass pedals for my dual axiom 61 vb3 setup. Do you use it for bass or synth parts?
They are great! I play bass so I use them for everything from keys to triggers to samples to song switching.
One more shot of my Cantabile rig, this time from IQ’s album launch show last night in London. Cantabile performed perfectly of course (better than I did to be honest…).
Neil
I just love gear porn! Very nice Neil!!
Do you go program up/down with the wide switches, out there where you can;t hit 'em accidentally? 
Hehe, no (good thinking though!). The one on the left is my song state increment switch. The one on the right is a assigned to different things for different parts of different songs - Leslie speed, toggling effects, triggering sounds etc.
I have an Akai LPD8 with buttons assigned for song state up/down, so if I need to decrement, I do it by hand.
Neil
Hi @Neil_Durant!
My mother’s friend asks if you could show your Cantabile window a little bit closer 
kind regards
Great pics Neil. Such a serious look. 
Good luck on your tour. Enjoying your new recordings.
Looks really good. The new album gets better and better on each listen. Good luck with the tour.
Hi Neil. Wish I Was There!
When are you coming back to the US? I was in China when you played an hour away from where I live in the NYC area.
Doug
Thanks all for your kind words!!
By the way, Cantabile to the rescue once again! During our show near Rome on Friday night one of my MIDI leads failed, and so I wasn’t getting a MIDI signal from my Prophet 6, which I need for certain tracks. I didn’t know specifically it was a cable failure, or which cable, just that I was getting no signal. But between songs I was able to do a bit of quick re-assigning/routing for the remainder of the set to work around it, saving the day. Thanks Cantabile!!!
Aww, that’s a real shame! We’re hoping to return to the US as soon as we can, and this time to do some “proper” IQ shows, rather than the compromised IQ sets we have to do at festivals (our last two US shows have both been festivals). We don’t have any definite plans yet, but we’re certainly looking at possibilities for 2020…
Neil
Puh. Do you still have an overview over your sounds? 
Looks like a massive rack count. How do you organize your sounds?
Yes, it’s large because it’s a long song with many parts, including sections with completely different instrumentation. It’s a credit to Cantabile that I can run all that lot simultaneously, and you can see on my load readout at the bottom that it’s still humming along at only 28% load.
I organise my sounds inside racks, so I’ll typically have one instrument plugin per rack, with rack states grouped into two categories, Generic and Song. The Generic ones are just useful, reusable sounds, that I can quickly dial up to get a particular type of standard sound. When I’m setting up a song I then store rack states named by the Song, so I can edit it and know it’s only used in that one song. For example in the image above, at the bottom my “Mellotron Choir” rack is on its “Threes” rack state; Threes is the original working title for the currently-selected song (For Another Lifetime). There’s some duplication because that might well be identical to other Mellotron Choir rack states, but I know it’s uniquely used in that song, so I can modify it without affecting other songs.
Eagle-eyed readers will see i have a load of embedded Omnisphere racks in the image above, named “Omni - something”. This is because this song uses loads of Omnisphere stuff, and I haven’t settled on a good way to manage this scenario in an easily reusable rack. Each only has one sound, so I should probably set up a single Omnisphere instance with sounds allocated to different multi-slots, and address then via different MIDI channels, but I haven’t got round to that yet. To be honest, the overhead of all those Omnisphere instances seems surprisingly light.
Neil
Here it is: