Use PBC 6X Without Presets

J

JasonTheWalrus

New Member
Hi all, I'm a new PBC user and I got bases on everyone saying you can "make it do anything you want it to". I have searched as much as I could and still am not seeing how to set it up for my workflow.

I'll describe how I would like to use it and I would love any input on how to make it work this way.

My ideal setup would be this:

- PBC 6X with 2 external switches connected.
- External switches used to scroll up and down through songs in a setlist, with the songs only changing MIDI clock tempo.
- 6 switches on the PBC dedicated to turning on and off each of the 6 loops.
- 7th switch to go to a second button page where 3 buttons are different verb presets via MIDI PC and 3 buttons are 3 delay presets via MIDI PC. 7th switch on this page would take me back to the loop control page.


Essentially, I don't want to use any presets in any of the songs. I want to be able to scroll through songs in a setlist and have that only change delay tempo via MIDI clock while the main pedal stays on my loops page and lets me access one more page with MIDI PCB messages on 6 of the switches.

Does that make sense? This seems to me like a very simple set up and its strange to me that the PBC can't seem to accommodate a simple setup like this.

Again, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Jason
 
The one thing that you can't do is have songs that don't contain presets. You can do one of two things:

1). Use presets in place of songs. The only downside to this is that you effectively only have one setlist (the list of presets)]]

2). Put one preset in each song. It's a little extra work, but will allow you to do what you want, and you'll have

Setting up the buttons to do what you want is no problem. I recommend by starting in the Buttons tab, right-clicking on the virtual PBC display, and selecting Copy Page From > Page 2. This will copy the loop buttons from the Loops page.

You can then edit the 2nd button page. Edit each button, remove the Audio / Loop Action, and add a PC action that sends a program change to one of your pedals. Repeat for each button on this page except Function. On all buttons that control the first pedal, sel Group to 1. On all buttons that control the second pedal, set Group to 2. This will make is so that only one preset button for the first pedal can be selected at any given time, and one preset button for the second pedal can be selected at a given time.

Edit the Function button on the second page, and edit the System / Page action to go page 1

Edit the external switches, set the first button's type to Preset - and the second button's type to Preset +

That should get you most of the way there. Please let me know if you have any other questions!
 
This is very helpful! Thank you!

So if I just add “preset 1” to each song, how do I make it so I never see presets when moving from one song to the next? And how do I make “Preset 1” which I’ll apply to each song not effect any of the loop states when going from one song to the next?

Finally, could I take the MIDI presets page a step further and make it so that when I click one of the MIDI preset switches, it automatically goes back to page 1 which has my loop switches?

Thanks!
 
The song name will always show up in the top line of the display, and the preset name will always show up in the bottom line. Probably the best thing to do in your case is split up the song name between the song and preset so that it takes up both lines.

In the main Audio tab, click the lock icon in each loop's box until you get to the yellow "I", which stands for independent. Independent loops don't change when you change presets.

Yes, you can add a "System / Page page:1" action to each of the MIDI preset buttons, and that will switch pages for you.
 
Alright. Board is wired up and I'm getting things dialed in. One thing I can't seem to find is a way to limit the number of MIDI clock pulses. My Selah Quartz gave me this option and its so nice.

Basically anytime you do anything that involves switching tempos, you can have it limit the number of MICI clock pulses that are sent with the new tempo. Most delay pedals will lock well after 6, so I set it to 10.

Is there a way to do this on the PBC? Could that be added?

Thanks!
Jason
 
Sorry, there isn't any way to do that currently. Interesting idea, never heard of any device doing that until now. The downside is that clocks in multiple devices can start to drift apart over time. However, running a continuous MIDI clock stream does have its own set of problems, so I can see why they'd do it.
 
Hey! I don't mean to resurrect this thread, but after finding it I've programmed my PBC6X basically the exact same way. Used it in a church service this weekend and loved it. As a singer and guitar player, it was great to just be able to leave my delay/verb presets the same and just change tempo, and then occasionally change what loops were on like drives.
The only issue I had was I would end a song with say, loops 2 and 4 turned on, and I would use my external switch to click "Preset+", and it would move to my next Song (using one preset per song). Loops 2 and 4 would stay on, but the buttons, specifically their LED colour, wouldn't reflect that. I went to turn on loop 3 and ended up stacking loops 2, 3, and 4, but the button LED's showed that only loop 3 was active. It wasn't until I looked at the screen and paid attention to what loops were turned on that I noticed. Is there a way to fix this?
rjmmusic said:
Sorry, there isn't any way to do that currently. Interesting idea, never heard of any device doing that until now. The downside is that clocks in multiple devices can start to drift apart over time. However, running a continuous MIDI clock stream does have its own set of problems, so I can see why they'd do it.
Click to expand...
 
jimmy.scott said:
Hey! I don't mean to resurrect this thread, but after finding it I've programmed my PBC6X basically the exact same way. Used it in a church service this weekend and loved it. As a singer and guitar player, it was great to just be able to leave my delay/verb presets the same and just change tempo, and then occasionally change what loops were on like drives.
The only issue I had was I would end a song with say, loops 2 and 4 turned on, and I would use my external switch to click "Preset+", and it would move to my next Song (using one preset per song). Loops 2 and 4 would stay on, but the buttons, specifically their LED colour, wouldn't reflect that. I went to turn on loop 3 and ended up stacking loops 2, 3, and 4, but the button LED's showed that only loop 3 was active. It wasn't until I looked at the screen and paid attention to what loops were turned on that I noticed. Is there a way to fix this?
Click to expand...
Are you using the latest firmware? That sounds like an old bug. If you do have the latest firmware and the problem is still happening, please send me your settings file and I'll have a look.
 
rjmmusic said:
Are you using the latest firmware? That sounds like an old bug. If you do have the latest firmware and the problem is still happening, please send me your settings file and I'll have a look.
Click to expand...
Hey! It's been a few weeks, and I finally had a chance to update to the latest firmware and the problem is still happening.
 
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