Thanks to everyone. This is really helpful.
I wanted to make one more argument, to emphasize why
this sysex business is important, and to raise an issue
with the design of all these types of devices.
Think about how your big rack works. You have a couple different
units in there, maybe one dedicated to reverbs, one to delays, etc.
each of these units has its own midi-PC controlled patch bank. So
you change the configuration by sending multiple PCs.
This is actually _simpler_ than an all-in-one design like the
Axe-Fx, because having multiple PCs factors the configuration
space, reducing the combinatorial complexity that occurs if you
only have one set of PCs.
This may seem a little pointy-headed, but it's one of those things
that becomes obvious when you start trying to layout your patches.
To put it in short techno-speak, all-in-one units with one patch-bank
address space do not scale. With each added effect type, the
configuration space grows multiplicatively.
Simple Example: I typically use
3 distinct delay configurations
2 distinct reverb configurations
2 distinct chorus configurations
That's really not that much. But it's still 12 different configurations,
not counting variations in the amp/cab block. With the naive PC/CC setup,
that means 12 separate patches. When all is done, I end up with 30 - 50
patches, where it feels like just a few should be enough.
Managing this is more painful than it should be.
Maybe for the "Axe-Fx II" Cliff can fix this problem. It's easy to do
in principle; you allow separate PC addressing for different device types,
so you can configure them in their own "sub-banks", and select them
independently. You have to do it without eating up MIDI channels
(which is something that happens in the big rack), but that doesn't
seem like a big problem.
In the meantime, the only practical solution is to try to set up a
few special "re-configuration" sysex messages, to help reduce the
patch space. Every little bit helps a lot; in the simple example,
reconfiguring delays on the fly saves a factor of 3, which is huge.
Anyway, maybe this is all obvious, but I wanted to say it as
clearly as I could. I'm guessing that I'm not alone...
