Scenario: Out of channel processing capacity on an SQ for an event. But, I dont need every channel all the time, so of the total count needed of more than 48 (57 in our case), less than 48 are used simultaneously at any given moment. We are currently using local sockets and GX4816 input sockets, so we have an excess on the GX. THe thought is to set up the 57 channels, then using scenes and IO changes, we can easily switch which inputs for each song. From the console routing, this is a simple task as the scene recall will change the IO. But the backline is using ME-1. The question is; How will this affect the ME-1?
Its assumed that during rehersal each ME-1 will need to be reprogrammed to include each new channel. But once all that is done, all teh scenes have been set in the console, all the ME-1s have heard each channel at least once, what happens during the performance? Will each scene change require ME-1 user intervention, or will each scene change auto populate to the ME-1? (and yes, we are out of ME-1 connection resources, to both the input IO and the ME-1 input/output would need to be modified within the scene.
I hope that makes sense… it did when I wrote it 
I’m not familiar with the SQ in so far as scene safes or what can be saved/changed with a scene recall. If you change the channel mapping for the ME output per scene, and saved within each scene, I would think that there would be nothing needing changed on the ME’s other than possible volume levels and even those can be saved on the ME’s as presets within the ME heads.
There are two “elements” of the ME system we should discuss. First, there is the routing element. The ME system has 40 inputs. You select which 40 sources you want to be sent to the ME system in the console/s routing page. Obviously it is easy to change which sources you want sent to the 40 ME inputs and you should be able to set this on a scene be scene basis.
The tricky part is that inside of a ME-1 unit, you have to set up which of the 40 inputs are assigned to individual encoders, and/or which of the 40 inputs you assign to “groups” and then which encoder to assign that group too. This encoder assignment is set by the source input (ME source 1-40) and will not change unless you reprogram the ME-1. Therefore if one band has 9 drum inputs (ME source inputs 1-9) and you assign those to a group (group 1) in the ME-1 and the next band only has 6 drum inputs and you use inputs 7-9 for different sources unrelated to drums, all 9 of those sources (ME source inputs 1-9) will still be assigned to the same group in the ME-1. This means that for the first band, group 1 is a drum group, but for the second band, group 1 is drums and three other sources. That could obviously be confusing to the musicians if their sources keep jumping around. Whether this really ends up being an issue depends on what channels/sources are changing between bands and how well your musicians can “go with the flow”.
Now the ME-1 units do allow you to program and save presets (I think up to 10 presets) right on the unit. The musicians could load a preset each time there was a major routing change (for each band in this example) and if that preset was programmed to reflect the incoming sources when it came to ME -1 groups, etc, it would work. The problem with this is the process to load a preset is a little cumbersome and you would need to ensure each musician is very comfortable making those changes themselves. Unfortunately there is no way to load the presets except from the hardware ME unit, so this isn’t something that could be programmed into the console’s scene system.
Then we should talk about channel names. Luckily this is easy. There are two ways to set up channel names in the ME units - either “automatic” where the system pulls the channel name from the console, or “manual” where you create a custom label for a channel in the ME system. If the system is set up for “automatic” channel names on all inputs, then the name displayed in the ME system would obviously change automatically if the console routed. I would recommend that you set all sources in the ME to use automatic names. This way any change in the sources being assigned to the 40 ME inputs will automatically be displayed correctly on the individual ME units.