Setmanager

Don't be confused about your priorities...
I've recently noticed that there is some confusion about the priority setting in the Terratec SetManager. You can assign a priority number from 0 to 127 to each Bankset (94B or TTS) and a lot of people don't know what this means and how they should use it.

First of all: Programs and Variations
The Dream chipset can access up to 127 programs in 127 variations (not banks!). So it can access theoretically 128*128=16384 instruments in total. To select a program do a normal MIDI Program Change with the number. To select a variation use MIDI Controller 0 (BankSelect). Note: you need to do a Program Change after the BankSelect to select the instrument (the BankSelect only defines the variation for the instrument after the next Program Change). This means that you can only assign one instrument to each program/variation. Not more.

The purpose of Priorities
If you have two banksets loaded on different slots in the SetManager, and both contain a instrument with the same program and variation number, you have a conflict. The priorities are invented to get around this problem. You simply give one of the two banksets a higher priority number and the instrument out of this bank will be used. Note that you can't access the other instrument with same program and variation now!

This has a lot of features: you can for example load different types of the same instrument for different styles of music ... or different songs. Just increase the priority of one bank in the SetManager and you have selected the instrument. If you need the other, change it back.

This also means that you should place new instruments onto places (programs and variations) which are not occupied by instruments in the GM or GS Set if you have it loaded and you want to use them.

Mute and Solo
The Mute and Solo switches are also easy to explain: If you set one bank in a slot to Solo, only the instruments from this bank can be accessed - not caring about the priority. If you Mute a bank in a slot the instruments from this bank can't be accessed.

You can simplify that by saying that all banks in the different slots behave as one single bank.