Snow questions for prospective buyer

    (first, apologies to users of infekted, I posted this there too...I need as much info as I can get) :)


    hello,


    I've been looking hard at the snow as a good way to
    1) supplement my motif live, motif handling the "bread and butter" keys sounds and virus for synth.
    2) work with (if not take over ) softsynths for home recording. Integration is a big selling point for me.


    Mainly for live use, I have a couple questions.


    I realize the snow is 4-part multitimbral; what is a good solution to get two keyboards to be able to play two different sounds from the virus? There are some songs that I'd love to exclusively use virus for, controlling from the motif and my other midi controller. I'd guess I'd need some kind of midi hub (since there's only one in on the virus) and transmit on different channels from the two controllers?


    Secondly, are splits possible on one midi channel? I'm looking at buying a friend's yamaha controller and I'm pretty sure it would not be able to transmit zones on different channels. (In ableton live/mainstage I've always just handled it on the receiving end). An example would be a bass sound on the bottom octave, a pad in the middle and a lead on the top. There's a few songs I do that would benefit from that.


    Failing being able to split, can patches be switched quickly with no load time/gap in sound?


    Lastly, the main competition in my mind for this is the M3 (believe it or not) as Nova music has a really good deal for it (as they do the virus). I realize it's a workstation, and those features I'd probably underuse, but I love the keybed and an added bonus would be some far superior hammond sounds than my motif classic...I'm prepared to live with the motif organs but I heard a ksounds soundset that was awesome I would welcome any thoughts on the M3 synths, I realize they would not offer the sound customization of the virus, but I do have a few nice softsynths for home use that do pretty well (zebra2 being a favorite).


    I certainly appreciate any thoughts! More time goes by I keep coming up with more options...I have to choose right as the boss--er, wife will not look kindly on multiple gear purchases.

    hi,


    what you need is some kind of midi merger to merge what's incoming from the two keyboards. the splits and layers you can setup using the multi mode which stores mot only the sound patches itself but information on which midi channel they are going to be received on, key span and other things. one nice touch about he multi mode in the snow is that it embeds the sound patches which means, if you tweak sound parameters to optimize a sound layer for instance, the snow will store all those patches in the multi.


    best, marc