Hey! Im doing 40-70 shows a year. The last years Ive used a Roland D50 and a piano module as my gear... (A sweethart to program midi presets.. One press of a button and my sounds on both my keyboard and my module has changed) But the shows tend to get pretty wild so Ive found myself buying new equipment too often( or using too much time trying to clean out beer )... So what Ive done: I bought myself a Fantom XR moudule, a 5 metre long midi cable, and a solid Gator flight case for my module, so I can safly hide my expensive sounds far away from the mad audience. I have made/programmed 10 sounds on the performance mode on the fantom xr so hopefully it should be ready ... Now the last thing I need is the cheapest midi keyboard in the world with 61 keys. It has to be so cheap that I dont have to worry if it would break and mailfunction after couple of shows.. (also if its cheap enough I could even consider to put it on our rider for our shows .. That would be cool.. A new and fresh keyboard on every gig??!?! yaaaaayyy .. ) It basically needs 2 things: a way to control my fantom xr performance presets.. And a Led display, so I know which sound to choose.. I could mention I used a yamaha cs1x as a midi keyboard when programming the sounds, but I cant figure out how to make the sound presets I made change with the yamaha in the right order in performance mode on the FantomXr (It seems to work in the patch mode though).. What do you guys think???
I think the M-audio axiom is cheapest with LED screen and a bunch of knobs and sliders, dunno if they can do sound changes or not.
There is no midi message that allows you to change between Roland performances - I've spent a long time trying to do the same thing! If each performance only contains one patch, then the simple solution is to copy all the patches you use into the user patch bank in the right order, and use the next patch control which is found on most controllers. If you use splits and layers then things are more complicated. The only ways there are to do it are either to use a midi keyboard that can transmit on multiple midi channels (one for each layer/split) and send lots of Program Change messages, or get a midi board that supports SYSEX. As far as I know all boards that support either of these are out of production at the moment.
Might want to look at the Roland/Cakewalk A-800PRO...? I havent seen much press on them, but they look cool.
