still learning new things 6 years on!

Doh, I only just discovered this today...

If you press WINDOW on the PROGRAM CHANGE field of a Track in MAIN mode,
you get a dialog which lets you set BANK SELECT messages (MIDI cc00) instead of Program Change messages.

Doh!

All these years,
I had quite often used Bank Select messages to change Multi at the start of a song,
but I'd always thought I had to manually insert a continuous controller 00 message into the track,
I didn't realise its "program change" facility could do them too.

Hurrah!

AND! it gets better.


The way I'd ordered my live sets before,
I'd usually have a different Multi for each song (with its own Effects).

And the first sequence in each song would have a cc00 message to select the multi,
and Program Change messages to switch all the Parts to the right Programs for that song.

Problem was, if I pressed Play Start in Song Mode,
I'd need to do it twice.

Because, the Program Change messages on each track would all fire first,
then the Bank Select in one of the tracks would fire........ to the first time the Multi changed,
it would've missed the program change messages.

NOW, I have my Bank Select message firing at the very beginning as part of the track's "Program Select" section.

AND, I just discovered the "Track Sort" function, which makes it very easy to swap the track sending the multi-select message as track one — I presume the tracks all fire their Program Change messages in track order.

Thus, my Bank/Multi select message now always fires first,
then all the Program Change messages for each part -
never end up with having to press Play Start twice at the start of a song. Hurrah!

Only took me 6 years to discover this

It'll probably take me 6 years just to understand what the hell your talking bout. But congrats on your achievement to the next level of 4 thousandom. hopefully Ill make it there myself.

well this is the thing -
because the MPC4000 reference guide is written in a very dry functional way,
you can read about something like that, and think "ok... but why would I ever want to do that?"...

I probably did read about it about 5 years ago, but had no use for it at the time.

If the manual instead had a section called "How to make completely sure the right sounds come out when you press Play, live on stage at a gig" then I might have twigged....

Yeah I know whatcha sayin, I discovered this about 2 years ago, after I suggested it for an additional feature! I also just discovered a use for the loop point feature and thought it was something new for the 4000 but has been on since the 2000xl. Now I can make whole sequences without song mode and do it by looping bits and chunks for an almost microscopic type of sequencing! I do have a question though, Im starting to think that when you press rec + play start, that the MPC takes a sort of snapshot of every setting so that it knows what to record while it is recording. An example would be whatever track mutes you have active or inactive and even the tempo. My question is if I am right in assuming that?

Oh also, you can save your track names and settings as a default template so you don''t have to rename your tracks everytime you start up. You could have kick drums, claps, snaps, toms, etc. labeled already and be able to easily identify tracks, now I thought that was one of the best administrative features ever on any piece of equipment!

Nice, unknown and forgotten features. Bank change is key. Can't say I remembered you could save default track names, could be useful if you always start tracks the same way. It would be nice to have a full list of all that is stored in flash memory/SRAM. There is a list in the 1.5 addendum, but it is missing quite a bit.

Ekl1p5e wrote:I do have a question though, Im starting to think that when you press rec + play start, that the MPC takes a sort of snapshot of every setting so that it knows what to record while it is recording. An example would be whatever track mutes you have active or inactive and even the tempo. My question is if I am right in assuming that?

Sort of, figure if you save a sequence, then load it up another time, your track mutes and tempo come back as they were, so it is always keeping track of these initial settings. Then if you want to record changes to the track mutes or insert tempo changes, it simply adds those events to the sequence, so they are relative to the initial settings. You are still able to change the original tempo and mutes, but the events you added will remain. So it is more that things like mutes, tempo, and track levels are sequence settings, then changes are sequence events. You can view track mute events by going to the track mute window and going to "edit" and tempo changes, hit window with cursor over tempo for tempo changes.

Similarly, you can set up q-links to mess with a programs parameters, but the MPC remembers the initial settings of the program so you are able to reset the controllers to get the original sound back without having to reload the program. There is a setting that tells programs to reset these changes when a program or sequence is changed.

Oh ok, I think you answered my question. If I started recording from bar 5 thru 8, starting with certain tracks muted and then started recording from 9 thru 12 with those tracks unmuted, then when I play the whole sequence and it gets to bar 9, the muted tracks will unmute right? Or if I didnt record nothing between 9 and 12 the tracks would stay muted until it got a message telling it to unmute? Thatz what it sounds like youre saying and thanks for your help!

Hung over, having trouble following that, haha. If you check the track mute events, it will explain everything that is recorded into the track. I decided to check it out, it is a little confusing and slightly different from how I was explaining it above.

Initially there are no track mute events recorded in the sequence, so the sequence itself has to store this info for each track. Any time you save a sequence, the current status of each mute is stored. Then, when you go to record track mutes, it inserts an event for the mute status of every used track. This way, every time you play the sequence back, it will go back to the way it was when you started recording regardless of the setting it is currently at. It is basically overriding the mute status that it was using before.