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In recent times, MIDI files have become popular for providing music to hymns and songs of praise and worship in small churches that do not have skilled Christian musicians. MIDI files have been found to be more flexible to backing tracks on CDs or Tapes as you can change the key or tempo of the song.

However MIDI files are still not flexible enough. You have to pre-arrange each song and anticipate how long the congregation will want to sing it before they get bored. You could on the other hand play safe and arrange each song in strict two verses/choruses each.

Either way, I have found this not to be flexible enough. In my church we have no clue how many times we will repeat verses and choruses until we start the song. This lead me to experiment with pattern sequencers that allow you to compose arrange a song by breaking it down into patterns (intro, verse, chorus and end) and providing you with buttons to switch between patterns as the music played.

My first instrument was a Yamaha QR10. It was designed to be an accompaniment player for a guitarists, but it fitted my requirements. It was portable, could take up to 10 songs (in theory) and had a decent drum beat, piano and keyboard sounds. However with most music hardware of the few years ago, memory was premium. Patterns could be only 8 bars long (Try arranging the chorus of Shine Jesus Shine). In addition, after 5 songs it came up with the dreaded "Memory full" message.

Enter the RM1X

And so I prayed that the designers at Yamaha and Roland (I use a VS-880) would design an up to date MIDI instrument like the QR10 but with much more memory and more real-time controls. Guess what!!, my prayers got answered, first of the assembly line was the Roland Grooveboxes (no disk drive) and more recently the Yamaha RM1X.

I have 16 patterns per song and each pattern can be 256 bars long!! (I only need 16). Now I can even arrange medley of songs and still not fill up the 16 available patterns. I still run out of memory, but between 15 to 20 songs which is enough for any Sunday morning service. The real-time controls let me start each song with basic instrumentation and gradually build up to full horns blaring between verses and choruses.

For my source of MIDI files, I either purchase quality professional stuff from http://www.dm-music.co.uk or I sequence it myself using band-in-a-box version 8 and my QS300 keyboard.

I weeks to come I will upload some of my own arrangements as pattern files for the RM1x and the QR10 (sadly I don?t use it any more).

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