Very in depth. Thanks.

One thing to watch out for is any reliance on the screens of these foot controllers. Most of them are primarily designed for guitarists, who stand behind the pedal and can see it clearly. Naturally, as a keyboard player, it’ll be buried under the keyboard, where you can’t see a damn thing!

So plan ahead, try to come up with ONE setup with standardized positions for what you tend to want to do the most, so you can start to develop a muscle memory for being able to hit the switches without looking, rather like playing organ pedals.

Try also to place show-stopping functions like Start/Stop, Break/Fills etc. at the opposite end of the pedalboard from where the buttons you’ll be hitting the most are, as insurance against accidentally hitting them. It takes a while before that muscle memory develops, and a missed button can play havoc with a song if you don’t think carefully about what is adjacent to what! 😱🤔

Depending on arranger, you might also, if you do find yourself needing different setups for different circumstances (Roland only ever had the one global layout for the FC-7, but I always felt one setup for style mode and one for SMF/MP3 use would have been a big improvement) you might be able to get the keyboard to send a patch change to the pedal when you change registrations. But I caution against having too many different ones. Two or three tops, I think…

Keep us informed about your journey… 🎹😎