Keyboard Rig Help!

[Lespaulguy]

HI. Let me preface this by saying that I am a guitar player, that happens to play keyboards on the occasional song. I consider myself adept with guitar gear. Keyboards, not so much.

My live rig presently consists of two Yamaha controllers (88 and 49 key; models escape me, but they are older), and a laptop pc on which I use Forte to host various plugins. I tend to beat the piss out of Kontact, but I have a few others. This all works reasonably well, but I find that the setup in Forte tends to get scrambled, and I have to regularly sort out the various assignments to get back to where I left it. It's gotten quite frustrating, and it's quite possible that I'm not as skilled as I need to be with setting up Forte, but I'm looking at alternatives.

I have keyboards with voices, but I prefer to leave them set up at home. Mainly cause they're heavy! So I'm looking at sound modules that I could rack mount in a case, and take out with me. I guess I'm leaning toward the Yamaha Motif series, as I assume they will interface most readily with all of the controls already existent on my controllers.

So, here's the actual question. Do I need a separate module for each controller? If so, do I need to run two midi cables, or can I just start at one of my controllers, and take advantage of the "in" and "through" ports to daisy chain the whole system together?

Many thanks.
Jim

 

[happyrat1]

You can daisy chain multiple modules to a single controller and assign individual channels to each module/voice...

Gary

 

[Steve Bolander]

You can daisy chain multiple modules to a single controller and assign individual channels to each module/voice...

Gary

You took the words right out of my mouth. Excellent suggestion.

Another (or additional) option would be an inexpensive passive MIDI switcher device of some sort, allowing the OP to select the destination from a single MIDI output to multiple MIDI inputs.