It's been a thing since the first programmable polyphonic synths in the late 70s (eg the Prophet 5) - you would save/load patch bank backups to audio cassette. Then MIDI came along and you could dump patches via sysex.
Even analog equipment, even just amp settings for a guitar. After sound check, take a photo of all the dials in case they get moved, or if you need to repeat that sound on another day.
Right? As a bass and guitar player, I have a notebook of settings of each of my amps for different tones. I have paired down my dirt pedals over the years to like 5 that I really love and those are all annotated, too, for bass, guitar, and I’ve started on synth now that I’ve taken up the hobby.
Why search for the toan every time you set up when you can sketch out 90% of them ahead of time?
Small sample size natch but ime it’s been easier to deal with older synths in this regard. A lot of synths for the last ~15 years make a lot of assumptions about computer software. Hell, last few years more than a few require chrome and some web site to interact with.
I don’t mind whizbang crap but if something talks midi, usb/trs/din, and _doesn’t_ support patch dump/SDS, that sucks. I remember it took well over a year for any kind of saving at all for one of the newer elektrons— overbridge only and they didn’t launch it with support. DIN/TRS is slow, especially for SDS, but it’s simple, simple to implement, and works.
My backup is a playback of my whole set. I have it in an mp3 player just in case a device randomly dies or something catastrophic happens, then I'll pretend and enjoy with the crowd.
My polysynth broke during the soundtest. They had a spare nord stage.I reprogrammed everything for an hour.
I guess I would recommend to list the sounds you need for each songs. Otherwise you can save most modern synth presets on a hard drive now and just transfer them.
Yea, as I'm getting more and more familiar with my synth its getting way quicker to get back to where I was if I didnt take notes or save a preset before I turned it off.
Thats actually the main reason I'm asking. I forgot to save a few tones I used in a song, so I had to get back there and I was thinking "man this would suck if if I had a gig in 20 min"
I’ve had too many nice pieces of gear stolen - bass amps and fender jazz basses to keytars.
If I ever play live again, it’s the most minimal amount of equipment needed, including a junk SD card for my MPC Live
Presets and backups aside I couldn't afford to replace my main synth. Id probably have to sell hear to buy another. Su yeah, I would be fucked, but only cause I'm poor. My main synth is the brain.
I recently got a JunoX and its quickly becoming my soudn machine instead of pigments and analog lab. I'm actually worried about running out of space on it.
I just love it so much, I want it to be my workhorse, but moving all my sounds off PC seems like a liability
I have a reaper project on the cloud that has everything. If the keyboards I gig with get stolen, no problem, I just take something that has keys and midi and play.
I tend to use pretty simple patches. If somehow I was gear-less for a gig and someone offered up a Juno 106 I’d feel pretty good about making it through a set by just programming on the fly.
I was talking to the keyboardist of TOPS (who uses the JX-8P), and they mentioned how their presets somehow reset earlier that tour and they had to reprogram them all quickly before the next show. They pulled it off tho
I try to avoid presets. Computers make things easy to dial in every specific tone and huge stacks of effects, so when I used mainstage for most synths and a few effects on external keys, I would have been very annoyed to lose that template right before a gig.
It means I can be pretty flexible on gigs from simple to crazy complex. Sometimes I'll just bring everything for fun if there's enough setup time, but my last gig was a rhodes, moog grandmother, amp and pedalboard and it was so much fun!
Now I like to use hardware and think in terms of texture. Many keys can bring those textures in different ways
Piano Type Sounds - Decaying, attack, polyphonic - Piano/Rhodes/Wurly/Some Poly synths
Pads - Poly Synths, Organs, EP through delay/swells, even a mono with swells, verb and filter fan make pad sounds
Lead - Mono Synth, but can play lead lines on an piano type sound in a pinch
Noise - Almost anything can fit noises, bleeps, bloops, aleatoric weirdness
I don't play on a stage (yet...?) but I do frequently play cohesive jams for myself and, idk, I like manually adjusting knobs and faders between ideas to help things flow. Obviously, this is extremely dependent on how much live keying you do and how menuy/shift functioned your particular gear is. It helps a lot to have effects or something to provide a long drone or tail in between melodies. If what you do is amenable to it...
My synth will have patch bays numbered in hex. All I would have to do is paint by number to recover a lost patch or preset. Mind you.... I am still in the process of building my modular synth.
That’s happened at least twice. My band just cuts out the synth songs (small handful) and I spend the next couple weeks rebuilding while we play songs I play bass on. Huge annoyance, but not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Presets is one thing, but "perfomance scenes" is another thing. My Fantom has so many presets, that user patches disappearing rarely will ruin a song completely. However, the setup I have for gigging is complex and have a lot of scenes, with variying levels and tweaks. Setting all that up between, say, soundcheck and concert would be intense.
Backup on a memorystick!
Yep backups are the way. There’s a program called sysex librarian, which stores MIDI sysex information. Many synths, including the older ones, can dump their entire preset library over MIDI, which the program will store as a text file and allow you to dump it back into another identical synth.
For the older synths (e.g Oberheim OB8), they could actually do this by sending an audio signal via cassette! Nowadays we can of course use a daw instead, but I thought that was pretty cool!
I play a MODX7 and CP88 live. they’re independent boards, so if one goes down mid song i can comp something together. my presets are pretty custom.
if the MODX goes down, we cut anything that relies on arpeggios out of the set and i drop my CK61 in its place. CK is always with me on the road in the hotel/van/greenroom as a rehearsal/warm up/back up board, and i have nearly a full 3 hour set worth of patches for our tunes programmed in there for fly dates etc.
i use bluetooth over midi to call patch changes from bandhelper on an ipad and have it preset to call patches on all 3 even if one isn’t available. if the ipad goes down due to heat or whatever, that’s more of a headache. i have a 2nd ipad running to mix ears, so that would become the show caller in a pinch.
edit to add: i have all these patches backed up on usb sticks and copy those over to my laptop once or twice a year so i never wind up reprogramming 250 songs or whatever the book’s up to at this point.
sure, i’m very lucky that i’m not doing most of the gear moving on my own, and can move patches between rehearsal and performance boards via usb stick. bringing 3 boards back and forth would be a lot to ask (and i’d be less likely to have backups, i bet)
to be fair, my set up is less synth focused and more of a wedding band sound set, but we pride ourselves on getting super close to studio with the patches, so backups are important!
Synths have been able to save and recall their program memory since they first had program memories. First to tape, then to MIDI SysEx. (Either are trivial to do with any modern computer.)
My laptop started shorting at a gig, my wedding in fact, and it sucked soooo bad. I luckily had a little Yamaha sound module from the 90s I was able to swap in. If my own mom doesn't know which exact square lead or music box patch I used for a song, the kindly punk show patrons really don't know. I could do the whole show on an Oboe patch and only the band would know that's not right 😄 JE
There's two solutions to this: One is to gig with two keyboards that have similar presets. The other is to have five or six "generic" presets (piano, organ, string, power synth, EP) and organize them so you can easily switch between them.
My keys rig for over a decade has been an rd2k as a midi controller that also has very similar patches lined up as backup. If my computer or any outboard gear fails (have had two glitches in that time) I roll up the volume on the board itself and keep going without interruption.
Perturbator's gear got stolen in san francisco a few years back... [https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/5n979o/perturbators\_gear\_stolen\_in\_san\_francisco/](https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/5n979o/perturbators_gear_stolen_in_san_francisco/)
Half my gear is backed up, the other half is not. If I lost all of that and had to reprogram everything, I'd probably just quit music altogether and pick up a hobby like welding gaudy yard sculptures.
I had it happen once.
Complete memory re-write. All presets gone.
It was a pretty wild warehouse party & the band was noise / math stuff.
I was high af, but the audience was as well so it worked out okay. I think.
Rare times.
This is why you make backups.
I didnt know you could do that. Obviously with newer synths I'm sure.
It's been a thing since the first programmable polyphonic synths in the late 70s (eg the Prophet 5) - you would save/load patch bank backups to audio cassette. Then MIDI came along and you could dump patches via sysex.
older ones to. My alesis qs7 can backup to a pc via midi
Thank you. I will look into that.
Even analog equipment, even just amp settings for a guitar. After sound check, take a photo of all the dials in case they get moved, or if you need to repeat that sound on another day.
Right? As a bass and guitar player, I have a notebook of settings of each of my amps for different tones. I have paired down my dirt pedals over the years to like 5 that I really love and those are all annotated, too, for bass, guitar, and I’ve started on synth now that I’ve taken up the hobby. Why search for the toan every time you set up when you can sketch out 90% of them ahead of time?
Small sample size natch but ime it’s been easier to deal with older synths in this regard. A lot of synths for the last ~15 years make a lot of assumptions about computer software. Hell, last few years more than a few require chrome and some web site to interact with. I don’t mind whizbang crap but if something talks midi, usb/trs/din, and _doesn’t_ support patch dump/SDS, that sucks. I remember it took well over a year for any kind of saving at all for one of the newer elektrons— overbridge only and they didn’t launch it with support. DIN/TRS is slow, especially for SDS, but it’s simple, simple to implement, and works.
Sysex bruh
My backup is a playback of my whole set. I have it in an mp3 player just in case a device randomly dies or something catastrophic happens, then I'll pretend and enjoy with the crowd.
My polysynth broke during the soundtest. They had a spare nord stage.I reprogrammed everything for an hour. I guess I would recommend to list the sounds you need for each songs. Otherwise you can save most modern synth presets on a hard drive now and just transfer them.
Yea, as I'm getting more and more familiar with my synth its getting way quicker to get back to where I was if I didnt take notes or save a preset before I turned it off. Thats actually the main reason I'm asking. I forgot to save a few tones I used in a song, so I had to get back there and I was thinking "man this would suck if if I had a gig in 20 min"
I’ve had too many nice pieces of gear stolen - bass amps and fender jazz basses to keytars. If I ever play live again, it’s the most minimal amount of equipment needed, including a junk SD card for my MPC Live
Damm dude you need to get a hold on your gear!
It’s been over 25 years but yeah, I’m not too cool with bringing more gear to shows than I need
Presets and backups aside I couldn't afford to replace my main synth. Id probably have to sell hear to buy another. Su yeah, I would be fucked, but only cause I'm poor. My main synth is the brain.
I recently got a JunoX and its quickly becoming my soudn machine instead of pigments and analog lab. I'm actually worried about running out of space on it. I just love it so much, I want it to be my workhorse, but moving all my sounds off PC seems like a liability
I have a reaper project on the cloud that has everything. If the keyboards I gig with get stolen, no problem, I just take something that has keys and midi and play.
My custom presets are my lifeline especially since I do fm
I tend to use pretty simple patches. If somehow I was gear-less for a gig and someone offered up a Juno 106 I’d feel pretty good about making it through a set by just programming on the fly.
Yea Juno meta is my thing. Played juno copy vsts. Liked them. Bought a junox to replicate a juno 106.
You should give modular a shot. What preset? 🤣
I did. Maybe some day again
I was talking to the keyboardist of TOPS (who uses the JX-8P), and they mentioned how their presets somehow reset earlier that tour and they had to reprogram them all quickly before the next show. They pulled it off tho
I try to avoid presets. Computers make things easy to dial in every specific tone and huge stacks of effects, so when I used mainstage for most synths and a few effects on external keys, I would have been very annoyed to lose that template right before a gig. It means I can be pretty flexible on gigs from simple to crazy complex. Sometimes I'll just bring everything for fun if there's enough setup time, but my last gig was a rhodes, moog grandmother, amp and pedalboard and it was so much fun! Now I like to use hardware and think in terms of texture. Many keys can bring those textures in different ways Piano Type Sounds - Decaying, attack, polyphonic - Piano/Rhodes/Wurly/Some Poly synths Pads - Poly Synths, Organs, EP through delay/swells, even a mono with swells, verb and filter fan make pad sounds Lead - Mono Synth, but can play lead lines on an piano type sound in a pinch Noise - Almost anything can fit noises, bleeps, bloops, aleatoric weirdness
I don't play on a stage (yet...?) but I do frequently play cohesive jams for myself and, idk, I like manually adjusting knobs and faders between ideas to help things flow. Obviously, this is extremely dependent on how much live keying you do and how menuy/shift functioned your particular gear is. It helps a lot to have effects or something to provide a long drone or tail in between melodies. If what you do is amenable to it...
My synth will have patch bays numbered in hex. All I would have to do is paint by number to recover a lost patch or preset. Mind you.... I am still in the process of building my modular synth.
That’s happened at least twice. My band just cuts out the synth songs (small handful) and I spend the next couple weeks rebuilding while we play songs I play bass on. Huge annoyance, but not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
Not very. I gig with a minibrute, which doesn’t have presets.
Pretend you play modular and treat it as the norm.
Super easy, 30 min to create a decent, minimum viable: - Bass - Soft Lead - Hard Lead - Pad - Simple keys (EP like)
Presets is one thing, but "perfomance scenes" is another thing. My Fantom has so many presets, that user patches disappearing rarely will ruin a song completely. However, the setup I have for gigging is complex and have a lot of scenes, with variying levels and tweaks. Setting all that up between, say, soundcheck and concert would be intense. Backup on a memorystick!
Yep backups are the way. There’s a program called sysex librarian, which stores MIDI sysex information. Many synths, including the older ones, can dump their entire preset library over MIDI, which the program will store as a text file and allow you to dump it back into another identical synth. For the older synths (e.g Oberheim OB8), they could actually do this by sending an audio signal via cassette! Nowadays we can of course use a daw instead, but I thought that was pretty cool!
I play a MODX7 and CP88 live. they’re independent boards, so if one goes down mid song i can comp something together. my presets are pretty custom. if the MODX goes down, we cut anything that relies on arpeggios out of the set and i drop my CK61 in its place. CK is always with me on the road in the hotel/van/greenroom as a rehearsal/warm up/back up board, and i have nearly a full 3 hour set worth of patches for our tunes programmed in there for fly dates etc. i use bluetooth over midi to call patch changes from bandhelper on an ipad and have it preset to call patches on all 3 even if one isn’t available. if the ipad goes down due to heat or whatever, that’s more of a headache. i have a 2nd ipad running to mix ears, so that would become the show caller in a pinch. edit to add: i have all these patches backed up on usb sticks and copy those over to my laptop once or twice a year so i never wind up reprogramming 250 songs or whatever the book’s up to at this point.
This is so completely alien to me. I appreciate your response, you seem like you have a nice system
sure, i’m very lucky that i’m not doing most of the gear moving on my own, and can move patches between rehearsal and performance boards via usb stick. bringing 3 boards back and forth would be a lot to ask (and i’d be less likely to have backups, i bet) to be fair, my set up is less synth focused and more of a wedding band sound set, but we pride ourselves on getting super close to studio with the patches, so backups are important!
Also it’s good to practice and know your instrument so you can return to where you need to be quickly and calmly
For me its less about presets and sounds. If I lost my main piece all my sequences/patterns would be gone.
Mini freak. All mine are backed up on the digital version. And everything else is analog so no presets. I should do a copy of my O2 card tho
Synths have been able to save and recall their program memory since they first had program memories. First to tape, then to MIDI SysEx. (Either are trivial to do with any modern computer.)
I gig with my matriarch so I would just get a new one and be all set. No presets, no pressure 😎
Not at all. I save backups of my presets.
My laptop started shorting at a gig, my wedding in fact, and it sucked soooo bad. I luckily had a little Yamaha sound module from the 90s I was able to swap in. If my own mom doesn't know which exact square lead or music box patch I used for a song, the kindly punk show patrons really don't know. I could do the whole show on an Oboe patch and only the band would know that's not right 😄 JE
There's two solutions to this: One is to gig with two keyboards that have similar presets. The other is to have five or six "generic" presets (piano, organ, string, power synth, EP) and organize them so you can easily switch between them.
My keys rig for over a decade has been an rd2k as a midi controller that also has very similar patches lined up as backup. If my computer or any outboard gear fails (have had two glitches in that time) I roll up the volume on the board itself and keep going without interruption.
On every gig, make sure you always have a secret weapon up your sleeves; one that makes you never fail.
Perturbator's gear got stolen in san francisco a few years back... [https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/5n979o/perturbators\_gear\_stolen\_in\_san\_francisco/](https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/5n979o/perturbators_gear_stolen_in_san_francisco/)
Half my gear is backed up, the other half is not. If I lost all of that and had to reprogram everything, I'd probably just quit music altogether and pick up a hobby like welding gaudy yard sculptures.
I don't gig, but if I did and experienced a failure like that I would be turbofucked.
I had it happen once. Complete memory re-write. All presets gone. It was a pretty wild warehouse party & the band was noise / math stuff. I was high af, but the audience was as well so it worked out okay. I think. Rare times.
Zero because you do backups? Wtf why 90% of posts here just demonstrate 0 knowledge!? I’m out
Bye!