Hi,

we want to use EXH 2880 in live situation in a highly MIDIfied band — so far, we were able to make it do everything we need except one thing, which I hope you guys can help me with:

We have a master clock running at all times setting the BPM for the whole band and we also send MIDI start command at the beginning of each song (to align first beat in all MIDIed devices). 2880 is slaved to the master (ext. clock and quantize on). We want to do the following:

1) start the song using MIDI start command
2) freely play intro on the instrument connected to 2880, say 8 bars
3) then, for the verse, the player records a quantized loop (4 bars; borders of the loop “fall” on the grid established by MIDI start command sent at the beginning), immediatelly plays it back and plays fills live on top of it (without recording)

This we can do, but we need help with this:

4) for chorus (8 bars), we need to mute the loop (so it is running in the background, silent, but it’s there)
5) then, for the second verse, we need the loop immediatelly back

My questions are:

Q1: Is there a way to mute the track other than setting the track slider to 0? This is not an option for us, as the player cannot use his hands at the time. I know this can be done using MIDI program change command, but can this be done using the 2880 foot controller alone?

Q2: Can the mute/unmute operation be quantized somehow?

Q3: Pressing PLAY at the beginning of the chorus seems to do something very close to what we want, except we lose synchronization of the beats (after “unmuting” the track, the loop is off the “grid” established at the beginning of the song) — is this normal behavior?

Thank you very much!