Need advices of preset and scrolling stategy

Morningstar Gear Planning Strategies
1

Hello everyone,

I’m using an MC6 MkII as the brain of my pedalboard. It remotes a Boss ES-8, an Eventide H90, a Strymon Volante, an Empress Zoia and a custom amp/cabinet sim running on a Bela board.
The basic communication between all of these units work fine.

Now, I’m trying to find the “best” way to organized my preset switching during live performance.

For now, I have some banks dedicated to the hardware themselves (storing specific states or programe inside the presets of these banks) and other banks dedicated to the songs themselves.

The “song” banks use the first page as the “controller” page and the second page as the “preset” page. To give you a concrete example, let say I have a song with 4 presets “Intro”, “Verse”, “Chorus”, “Outro”, I would allocate these four presets to 4 of the 6 presets of the second page. Then, I’ll use the first page to display the song name, the use one of the presets in scroll message mode to sequence the appearance of the presets of the second page. Hope I’m being clear enough !

The issue is that I would like to see on which preset I am. My scroll preset is named so that I can see the index of the message I’m at, but it’s not really helpfull in performance context.

I’ve seen that one could change the name of the scroll preset by using a “Set Preset Name” message and by making sure the scroll preset use a step of two instead of one. This led to two issues:

  • On my controller, with latest firmware, I can’t use more than 4 char to rename the preset… Even with some imagination, it’s hard to find meaningful names :stuck_out_tongue:
  • This reduce the number of possible preset per song to 8 max ! This is a real drawback for me.

What would you suggest to improve that setup ? I’m not against rethinking the whole thing at all ! The main design principle is to only have to care about this “next” button when playing.

Thanks for your help !
Jean-Loup

2

Hi,
if you use an external foot switch to scroll through your presets you could stay on the page with your song presets and simply use the preset blink as an indicator. If you need more than six presets you’d have to find a way to jump to the next page.
Maybe a ‘page jump’ programmed with an ‘on disengage’ action in the last preset might do the trick.

3

The MC8 shows the Bank and Page number. There’s not enough space on the MC6.

I could potentially see a feature added that allows you to add something like %B and %P to the text in a label that would expand into Bank # and Page #.

4

If it’s a single press - for chorus / verse / bridge etc
I use a MC counter 3 for this purpose.
Named “Current Patch”.
At least then you can see the counter pointer value that corresponds to the patch number.

EG I use the %E3 placeholder (eg if using counter 3) in the short name AND LONG NAME of the MC preset, and then UPDATE the counter to match the current patch name on the fly.

If your FX pedal has a screen - look at that for the preset name.

5

See the user manual