Program Change automation

Hello - I've got a MIDI track and I want to automate a program change on sequence 2. For sequence 1, I want to manually change the program, so no PC when I hit play on sequence 1.

This can be done if I enter a specific program change on the program front page. But wait, now it's important to me to combine sequence 1 and 2. The PC at the beginning of sequence 2 (now middle of sequence 1) is not preserved. So I can enter an automation lane of PCs and add the PC in the correct time. However, as soon as I create the PC automation lane is seems like I must send a PC at the beginning of the sequence. I cannot turn it off.

^^
Above is a simple example, in reality I have a bunch of songs for my band. All songs have one sequence per song section, but now I need to merge them into one sequence per song. I send a bunch of PCs to various synths at various points in a song. And sometimes A synth needs to be playing with the MPC off, then I hit play but I don't want the synth to receive a program change.

I cannot delete the PC at time 0 in list edit mode.

Any ideas? Thanks!

I feel your pain. There's not anything you can do about this. The MPC insists that all parameters that are automated be initialized at the beginning of each sequence. They can be initialized to any value you want, however, so in the case of your sequence 2, you should set the initial PC to the same value that you select in sequence 1. And hopefully, the synth you are automating is not one of those that glitches when it receives a duplicate program change. If it is you might try sticking a MIDI filter before it; I use a MIDI Solutions event processor to filter out some of the unnecessary junk that the MPC sends to my Nord G2.

Thanks for the info, jamos. Good to know but it's pretty frustrating. I'll figure out how to use this limitation. Could be that I have an empty 1-bar sequence that just loops while the synth its doing its thing, then instead of hitting play, the MPC's section starts with me triggering next sequence (which would be the rest of the song)...

Ugh, that wouldn't work either because I'd need to have a PC at the beginning of the song sequence. Anyway I'll work through it.