P2K uses both the bank select controller MSB and LSB. This may be new to some of you who only have used the bank select LSB (controller 32) to select banks. You may even have older gear that won't even send the bank controller MSB (controller 0). Emu gives each sound set its own bank MSB. This way, no matter what slot you have your set in, it will always be selected by the same bank select command. This means sequences can be exchanged between users and will always play correctly as long as you both have the sound set(s) installed.

The "downside" to this is that bank numbers do not necessarily advance in contiguous order. For example, the Composer sound set that comes in your P2K has a bank MSB of 4 (press the Audition button on a CMPSR preset and it shows you the correct bank MSB and LSB to send). User presets always have a bank MSB of 0 -- So when you scroll from the last user bank (MSB=0, LSB=3) to the first Composer bank (MSB=4, LSB=0) you skip over a bunch of numbers. What happened to MSB 1,2, and 3?!

Those are other sound sets you have not seen yet!

O.K. so what does this mean to you and your sequencing software? I wish I could tell you. I don't know what software you use and they each do things differently. Some have you enter distinct values for bank MSB, LSB, and patch. That's the easy one. Others make you combine the numbers together to make one number that it sends out as a "14 bit controller" which just means it will break the number back down again and send some on controller 0, some on controller 32. How do you combine the bank MSB and LSB? Well, you first need a degree in Computer Science. Then you multiply the bank MSB by 128 (because there are only 7 bits in a MIDI data byte and the MSB goes into the next byte, but you already knew that being a Computer Science Ph.D.) and then add that to the bank LSB.

For example, to choose the Composer ROM, Bank 2 :
4 (the ROM MSB) * 128 + 2 (the Bank LSB) = 514.