Hello BM - and yes, that all worked absolutely fine, thank you. I forget about the functional changes with the buttons. Certainly a lot of good thinking gone into that, and it works a treat once you get your head round which are Parts and which are Elements, and when! There's a lot of editing stuff in the various screens that I don't yet understand. but Rome wasn't built in a day. I'm not too sure that the sliders are the best way of changing values though - for one thing they only work on volumes, so I have to keep dodging back to the data wheel anyway - easier to stick with it for everything. But I'm now a Happy Chap with the simplicity of 'auditioning' the Elements as I go along. Another bit of Montage lateral thinking ...

I beg to differ. Faders were designed for levels... I contend that is what they do best, particularly when balancing multiple sources. Before recording console had faders controlling levels was a nightmare (each channel had a big knob, looked like a old movie space ship panel). I think you've gotten used to not having access to simultaneous volume controls, you'll have to teach yourself to get used to them again.

I know a lot of this is personal preference, but faders and Volume, especially when there are multiple channels of levels, that's the preferred method. Data Dial is one at a time, not conducive for balancing multiple Elements, imho.

To bring the mixer analogy forward - may be nice in a future revision to think about hardware mute/solo buttons below or above each slider. Then element solo could be a two button operation. Button-press to solo the PART you want to deal with then button-press for the element you want to solo.

In certain modes having those buttons serve some other function may be useful or simply hard-wire to always PART 1-8 (or 9-16) mute/solo. Also crossing fingers for future gens to have full keyboard control over PARTs 1-16 so mute/solo for 9-16 makes more sense than today.

@Rod

I think that auditioning an Element is very much a "programming" function and not necessarily a "performance" function. Therefore, I think that spending less than a minute to setup the performance prior to doing a "programming" operation is not a big deal (my opinion) and worth re-thinking how you approach and evaluate the workflow considering programming is not typically a quick one-minute operation. The amount of time tuning the parameters dwarfs the less than a minute it takes to setup the performance to isolate all PARTs except the one you're working on.

From the [PERFORMANCE] (HOME) screen - quickly running a tap along each PART's keyboard control (to turn it off) is all that is needed as one method of accomplishing this. You can also do this by running a finger across the MUTE for each PART except for the one you are working with. Or you can use the sliders to adjust the level although I would personally stay away from this because the balance with the levels is not something I would want to mess with just to audition a single element. I'd rather use mute/solo/keyboard control to isolate a PART and an element within a PART. However, the slider option is there.

Point being is you have multiple methods to get to the destination and all take less than a minute to accomplish. Meanwhile, you could spend 30 minutes or more listening to different elements and tuning parameters to make the element work for you. So the brief setup (even if you need to do this multiple times) is not a huge "tax".

If you setup using the keyboard control method - then each PART will be isolated automatically after setting the performance up once. For each PART - you would not need to reconfigure MUTE/SOLO for the PART level since keyboard control automatically takes care of this operation.

The DATA DIAL is not an absolute control. The faster you spin it - the more it increments. There's no "line" that tells you where the DATA DIAL is located in the span of a parameter. It's good for some things - but not so great for reaching absolute values where sliders or even fixed dials (like Montage's A/D input gain) are better for this.

Take some time to familiarize yourself with some of the alternatives to accomplish what you want then see if you are still lacking. I do agree there's perhaps some chance of improvement - but I think the gap is perhaps smaller than you are thinking since you haven't yet exhausted the options.