Let's talk about ensembles a little...

[jaytee]

For the last four or five years, all of my MBSIDing was confined to a sammichSID. Since there's only one core in a sammichSID, I never used or tried to learn ensembles much. All I really understood was that a few global settings are stored in the Ensemble section, and that if my patches were acting weird for some reason, it was probably because I had accidentally switched Ensembles.

I've just built a fully-stuffed MB-6582, though, so it seems like it's time to figure out ensembles. I understand the basic premise, I think. An ensemble is a snapshot of what all four cores are doing, right? Just one patch for each core, plus the global settings?

What I'm more curious about is how folks are using and storing ensembles.

E001 seems kind of useless, since it's liable to be overwritten with the firmware. So I guess E002 should probably be my default. Set up global settings to work with my hardware setup and use E002 as a scratchpad; then copy to the next available location every time I come up with a setting I like?

Do folks find that they set up ensembles very often, or do most folks tend to deal with patches on a core-by-core basis and only set up an ensemble as strictly necessary?

This is really my only multi-output, multitimbral synth, so I'm not entirely used to this in my workflow is all, just looking for ideas as to how others use this feature. TBH, the primary drives behind wanting an MB-6582 were the control surface and the super-poly mode (plus, as long as the hardware supports it, I may as well build the most badass synth I can!). The ability to run four MB SID cores independently is just a really nice bonus that I'm not sure how I'll utilize.

[ChinMuzik]

I always wondered about this too because I wanted to set the MB up as a super polysynth. So, to get 24 voices mono...I'd assume I'd  have to load the same patch to each core, then configure the keyboard split to 4 zones to correspond with the 4 cores.

Which leads me to believe the easiest way to do this would be saving an ensemble with this config. 

Edited March 14, 2017 by ChinMuzik

[jjonas]

I have a few ensembles, but most of the time I use E002 with pretty straightforward settings.

The other ensembles that I have contain keyboard split zone settings (in the INS submenu), either for "normal" lead patches (each zone playing instrument 1 on up to four different MIDI channels, i.e. one channel per core), or for multi patches (up to 6 instruments on different zones of the keyboard).

Also it can be useful to check whether you want your multi, drum and bassline patches playing mono (set in the SID submenu), unless you can address the (possibly inconvenient) hard left/right pan issue in your mixer (by setting separate left and right channel inputs to the middle). The latter solution is better, because in mono mode you "lose" half of the oscillators (because each stereo pair now plays the same sound).