More Presets, Please (like, 5x the number of songs)

Jonn

Active Member
This is one of those that's either super easy because it's an arbitrary value set in the software, or nearly impossible because the current number (768) is tied to hardware limitations. Hoping it's the former :-D

I could really use more presets. I've run out of presets, so from here, doubling it to 1536 sounds good. But that's fairly arbitrary too. Having 5x the number of songs (which my PBC currently supports 1008) would make sense to me, based on how I'm currently using the PBC.

Now, I imagine I must be using the PBC in an unexpected way. That I should be defining a smaller set of presets (my 5 favorite lead tones, my 3 favorite rhythm sounds, various ambient patches, etc.) and then reuse these presets over and over again, in varying orders, in my songs. I've tried this several times and repeatedly came to the conclusion that it works better for me to have 4 to 6 dedicated presets for each song.

Background: I'm in a band with a a dozen+ original songs and a handful of covers we occasionally drop into sets. AND I play at church on Sundays where we play I guess what you would call "modern worship" or maybe CCM - it's like being in a cover band that plays songs from worship bands like Bethel, Elevation, Passion, Jesus Culture, and artists like Phil Wickham and Chris Tomlin. Plus we occasionally throw in older hymns and praise choruses that we arrange in a modern style, and we have additional special music for Advent/Christmas season. On top of that, we generally play a "radio hit" cover song as a walk-in song before services (a one-off cover each week). Our song list currently has 475 songs in it, of which I've programmed 135 into my PBC over the last couple of years. That brings me to 155 songs in my PBC settings.

And what works best for me, regarding presets, is to have each song section saved into a corresponding dedicated preset. Like: intro, verse 1, chorus, verse 2, bridge, solo. Or: verse, chorus 1, chorus 2, bridge 1, bridge 2, solo. Whatever the song arrangement calls for. I save these presets with the song title (abbreviate) prefixed to the preset name, which gives me visual confirmation I'm where I think I am on the PBC at a glance.

My first 6 loops are dry effects, which I mix and match in only a handful of ways. My last 4 loops are wet effects that have many more options (2 Strymon pedals and an H9 are also controlled by MIDI, each with multiple dozens of presets that are assigned via PBC presets). While it's easy for me to think of the dry effects in terms of "go to" sounds, the alignment of wet effects is much easier for me to think of in terms of the song rather than types of sounds.

And, even if I start a song off by copying presets from a song with similar sounds, I prefer to keep these presets separate and dedicated to the corresponding song, so I can make changes during rehearsal, on the fly, knowing I'm only updating the preset of the song we're working on, not the song with the similar (but turns out not quite the same) sounds.

So, with the way the PBC works best for me, I could really use more presets. I need roughly 4~6 presets per song.

Thanks for making my life better, with or without more presets!
 
I would be suprised if RJM can add more presets. The device probably uses all the memory it has available. One work around you could try is to keep multiple .rjm files. Maybe one for church, and one for your band. You can also try out the export function. You can export songs, and presets too I think. It's under File>export in the latest PBC editor.
 
I would be suprised if RJM can add more presets. The device probably uses all the memory it has available. One work around you could try is to keep multiple .rjm files. Maybe one for church, and one for your band. You can also try out the export function. You can export songs, and presets too I think. It's under File>export in the latest PBC editor.

Thanks for trying to help Zach. Yeah, that's what I fear. As a software engineer, I'm surprised there would be such a low limit on a data structure holding config values, but I don't work on embedded realtime systems where storage is so limited.

I have tried using multiple config files, one for band, one for regular church. The export feature does make it easy to start a new config from just the global/system config of the original. But as most of the songs/presets are used up by church and I'm often doing band stuff between church rehearsal on Thursday and church Sunday morning, having two separate configs adds a lot of hassle for little gain.

Also, song/preset export doesn't seem very practical. I might be doing it wrong, but everything seems to be locked to the position values, so if I export a song and its presets, they can only be imported into the same positions. It would be nice if we could import song/preset sets into whatever the next available slots are. But I suppose that's for another feature request.
 
I feel you, bro. It can be annoying running into a device's limitations sometimes. One thing that I started doing a while ago is building presets that are generic for church songs, but have on the fly control with the expression pedal. By resusing the same list of a hundred or so presets I'm able to save a ton of space. Some songs are too specific though, and will demand their own dialed in preset. A lot of worship tunes are pretty similar though. My friend Wesley had the same problem you are having with his PBC10 rig. I think he has shifted to more of this approach when he can afford to with the right songs. Hope this helps!
 
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