Turning notes into sounds - Banks

• It’s very common ( normal in fact ) for a MIDI instrument to support many different patches. These are organised in a particular way.
• The term ‘bank’ is used to refer to a collection of ‘patches’. In other words, a bank is a set of different sounds.
• An instrument can have from 1 to 16384 banks, with from 1 to 128 patches in a bank. That’s over 2 million patches. No real system actually does this.
• So, to specify a sound it is necessary to specify the bank number and program number ( offset in the bank ) that corresponds to a patch.