Hi Bob. Welcome to the party. And thanks for the encouragement.

Agree with you completely regarding Andrew's highly competant and detailed explanations. Thanks again Andrew.

Yeah, Bob, I've previously been using software synths. The advantages, in my experience, are that they sound great and are very convenient as plugins. The down side I've found is the latency and higher cpu useage - the latecny I find particularly annoying. (My instrument is guitar, the Roland midi guitar controller already has about all the latency I can tolerate.)

To get my feet wet with hardware synths, I picked up a couple of inexpensive used JV's for trial before investing the big bucks for more contemporary hardware.

So here I am.

Dealing with the learning curve with new hardware is tough enough. Then getting into previously unexplored areas of software programs like Biab, RB, etc. - and learning their idosyncracies - to utilize the new hardware just serves to compound the "pucker" factor. lol

In the beginning, when digesting all the new information, a lot of terms sound alike and seem to be synonymous and interchangeable in some contexts - like Program Change and Program (patch) - but when getting into the fine details, they are not.

Yes, and all software has it's own little foibles, it seems.

It just floors me sometimes. Stuff like the Biab song memo reading "melody is 179 notes, saved patch is Trumpet". Silly me! I thought that the statement "saved patch is 57 Trumpet" actually meant the '57 Trumpet patch was saved' in the song file.............

Or checkboxes. Every checkbox I've ever met is selected or deselected by CLICKING IN THE BOX. That Mid Monitor window really threw me when clicking in the box was completely unresponsive. For a moment I thought I was loosing grip on reality. lol

Turns out, clicking the adjacent unremarkable text (no highlight or any other indication the text is active) changes the checkbox. A definite "pucker factor" increase.

These little idiosyncrancies or inconsistencies can really throw one off track when venturing into new territory in a program. Once encountered and learned, though, one just makes a mental note of such things and moves on. It can be maddening at the time, just the way it is, it seems.

Thanks again, Bob, for your comments and encouragement. Good luck with your new hardware setup, I'm a little green with envy.

Lawrence