Tracey:

Actually, you don't really need to know anything more about sysex except that it's data. If you set a certain part of a patch envelope to a certain parameter, there's a hex message that tells the XP that.

When you save a patch as sysex (system exclusive data), you're just saving all these hex message in a big, well, a big glob of data. You can put this glob anywhere you want. We're just putting it at the beginning of a song and saving the song.

When you play back the song, it spits this glob into the XP and there's your patch ("spitting globs," well, go with me on this one).

When you download .mid files with patches, that's all your downloading: a dummy song in .mid format (rather than the XP's own .svq format) with that glob of sysex patch data at the beginning of the song. You play the song back, it spits the glob into the XP. That's exactly what a dummy song does.

So you've *already* been dealing with patches this way.