Tour of duty, sounds like I've been to war
. I've been working a bit playing bass, nothing electronic unfortunately. I've been back for a few days now but it takes a while to catch up.
Anyways.
Adam B - I use an rm1x live too, top little machine. I hardly use song mode, I tend to flick in and out of several user patterns for each track.
The rm1x can only transmit 16 midi tracks at once so I end up using many different patterns per track. It's very rare for me to be playing 16 midi tracks at once so I'm very econmical and divide them up eg pattern 1 = intro ,2 =main song, 3=middle bit etc. Because of the beauty of Multisetups I never run out of tracks, I simply change the Multisetup as I change the pattern. I also put in linking patterns where the drums from the frist track are playing but with a the bassline from the 2nd.
The only limit here is there are only 99 Multisetups and 99 patterns on the rm1x but to be honest a 1 hour set will only use about 50 or 60 of each.
I can get away with this by the way I organise my presets. I've posted this before so sorry to repeat but basically what I've done is devised my own general midi. C1-D1 bass drum, D#1-F Hihats etc. I can't remember the specifics but somewhere I have 2 octaves of playable bass, 2 octaves of some sort of synth/keys for soloing etc - all in 1 Preset. It was hard to convert older songs to this format but now I have a main Preset template which I start all new ideas with. It basically means when I play live I can slowly evolve from one song to another. Thank god for Multisetups. Before my Ultra I basically had to change presets by hand, I still do to a certain extent but if I get lost or the track is going to change I just select the next Multisetup. If only Multisetup could be controlled by midi :(
My set is basically a jumble of completed songs (not many) and loops/ideas I've been working on and never finished (loads). I have to compromise a bit on ram but it's amazing what you can cut out or recylce. Anyway it doesn't take long to load in a bank if needed, as much as I hate and never use the rm1x sounds, they can be handy for continuity if something fresh needs loading in.
I have to say I love Ableton Live to bits and when I can afford it I'll get a laptop and run it alongside with my emu and rm1x. If Ableton can make their midi side of things as flexible as my rm1x midi then I'll ditch the blue box completely. If I can sort my compact flash to IDE idea out then there'll be no fiddly scsi to setup. Sorry to say but if the right software came out and it was rock solid then I'd probably go completely laptop.
Andrew