MIDI pedals with no screens - best practice suggestions

jjtguitar

jjtguitar

Well-Known Member
Hi everyone,
Wondering if people would suggest their solutions/best practice for using MIDI pedals that don’t have screens with a PBC?
How do you keep track of what preset is being used?
I currently use a PBC10 with four MIDI pedals with screens. Nice and easy.
I am about to integrate two new MIDI pedals to the setup that don’t have screens.
I basically have two workflows. For my work with a function band, everything is programmed beforehand, per song, so no screen isn’t really a big deal.
But when I play at church, I’m generally playing on the fly. I have six songs of five presets each, so I can quickly program stuff during sound check.
I will set up IA pages for my favourite sounds, and I can change the name of the IA button to match the recalled preset, so recalling favourites won’t be too tricky.
But how do I know/remember which sounds I’m pulling up for a particular preset. For this workflow I’ll have 30 presets (6 songs x 5 presets) to keep track of.
Any suggestions for how people keep track/work with this would be greatly appreciated.
I hope I’ve made sense! Thanks in advance!
Jonno
 
Im a bit nerdy… I have a spreadsheet with a different tab for each pedal and each tab has a list of presets for that pedal. That’s the starting point.

I have also set up a page on the PBC for each pedal with at least a + and - button to “scroll” through presets on the fly. You could also set up IA buttons there to have easy access to your most frequently used presets for that pedal.

I’ve also set up “favorites” pages which have an IA cycle button for each effect type. So one cycles through 4 gain stages, plus a hold function for boost, that accounts for 4 pedals (clean, low/med/high gain, and boost). Then others will cycle through my most used presets on each pedal, like my delay that will go from almost unnoticeable (default) to 1/4, 1/8, and dotted 1/8. Similar with other stuff.

Taking it a step further, you could assign presets on a single device in a way that’s memorable, using some mnemonic like low to high (whether it’s gain, wetness, modulation, etc.) so you basically step through increased whatever as the presets increment. You can also group them into types, like for delay you could have the first few presets be rhythmic, the next few be ambient, then reverse, etc., and each set increments in effect (repeats, mix, or whatever) as the presets increment.

The one other thing that could help is to program IA buttons on a page to represent each preset on the pedal and name them there. Then at least you’d see the preset name when you get to it and you know what you’re saving to the PBC preset.
 
Thanks for sharing. I do the same with a spreadsheet, different tabs for each pedal :D

I also have the scroll page set up, and IA favourite pages for each pedal. Great minds think alike!

I like the idea of the "favourites" page, I hadn't thought/known to do be able to make an IA cycle button, which cycles through. I'll definitely give that a try!

I'm pondering working out some way/naming system for the preset name to reference what preset is being recalled on no screen pedals.
 
Do either of you mind posting perhaps a screenshot of this, or sharing more details on your organizational system? I'm preparing to do a deep dive into the PBC/6X and am looking for a way to organize everything. Thanks if so!
 
I also do a spreadsheet on Google Drive so that I can access it from anywhere. Been using it for several years now, and it's very handy to have on hand.

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JW PBC Spreadsheet 01.png

Here is one of the pages from my spreadsheet, the one I use for my Free the Tone Future Factory. This one is a near direct recreation of the preset list from the manual for this pedal, lots of detail. I find this useful because this pedal only has a number screen for presets, no name.

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Here is the page for my BigSky, this is what most of my pages look like, very simple. I found this really helpful for Strymon stuff because it's hard to remember that PC 7 actually means Preset # 02A.

So having a spreadsheet with different pages/tabs/sheets for each MIDI pedal, very useful. Doesn't have to be fancy or pretty.

I do have a few pages in this spreadsheet which I intended to use for keeping track of PBC presets and pages etc, but I find that I don't use them. I do all of that PBC "housekeeping" in the excellent PBC Editor app.

My organisational system for the PBC is as follows:

I create discrete presets for each sound I want in a song. They are named "Intro|Song Name" etc. The vertical bar (shift+\ on my keyboard) means that only the bit in front of the vertical bar show up on the PBC screen. This way I can easily see which preset goes with which song, and I don't have 89 "Intro" presets with no idea which preset belongs to which song.

I always use a Global Preset on button 6, usually some derivation of clean.

When creating presets for new songs that I want to program I've found this workflow works for me:
1. Create presets for each section (or even just call them 1, 2, 3 or something simple.
2. Set MIDI PC messages to my "default" sounds on MIDI pedals (e.g. basic room reverb, dot 8th delay, chorus on H9)
3. Create song, add presets to song.
4. Upload changes to PBC. - you will now probably have a song with (up to) five identical presets. I find it much easier to turn loops on and change MIDI presets (more on this in a minute) on the fly with the PBC itself as opposed to in the editor.
5. For each preset, turn loops on as required, change MIDI presets as required, save, then in the editor "Read the settings from the device".

This is the way that works for me. I'm pretty I've copied/learnt all of these strategies from Goodwood Audio and Omillion Audio videos.

The Buttons tab in the Mastermind Editor is where things get really awesome. I currently run 7 pages.
Page 1 is the default presets page, bank up/down, IA access/save.
Page 2 is Loops
Page 3 is Scroll - so I can easily scroll patch up/down on my four MIDI pedals.
1678763555641.png
Page 4 is BigSky IA - so I can instantly retrieve my favourite presets for the BigSky.
1678763608580.png
Page 5 is H9 IA (it says H9 IA 1 because I initially planned to have another IA page because there are so many good presets in here, but I haven't got around to that yet).
1678763661394.png
 
I have been working on a visual overlay for the PBC that would possibly help remember what goes where in regards to IA presets etc. I currently use print out labels to label my PBC, which only indicates which pedal is in which loop.

Here is an example of the overlay. This version tried to use colour to indicate which pedal was which. I have printed it out and laminated it and made it fit, but I found that I'm remembering where each IA preset is, so this may be superfluous to my needs. And I think it is very busy to look at, so may be confusing. The idea was you could write or stick with print out labels in each box what IA woudl be recalled if you were on that pedals IA page.

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Wow, this is very intricate. Thank you for sharing! My RJM PBC/6X was shipped recently, and I just have to pick it up. I suppose I'm not going to fully understand this until I dive in and try to do the same myself.
 
My pleasure, glad to hopefully be of some help! This forum is great if you get stuck. I read the manual from cover to cover while my PBC10 was being shipped to me, and then I just started patching pedals in and working it out. And for the most part, it does just work. The Mastermind/PBC products are very user friendly, very easy to use. The editor is great.

I just spent some time today creating new presets for an upcoming gig, and the spreadsheet was really helpful, just for recalling preset numbers to put into the editor.
 
Stage use, normally, I have set-lists so the songs depict what is used.

Within the set-list, the songs have verse chorus/bridge and lead configurations. Selection of songs are just a simple up/down button. Pre-song-selection, the verse, chorus, etc configurations whatever or however many there were for songs blink (cycle) and the names appeared on the screen to let me know what is available as it refreshes my memory for the song to what is available. Anything that is used for those sections and needed on-the-fly control were configured with the separate external two button control. So if trails or repeat was needed as an example, those were always hit using the external buttons.

Anything that was not set in a set-list, was IA for those pedals and the names of them are listed above each button. In those cases, only trails or repeat/tap tempo was used, which again is used on the external control.

Essentially, the external two buttons were used for those special effects needed. This simplified the need of having to create a spreadsheet or other memorized configuration.
 
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