External Instrument Racks - Change patchs with clips

[onshiftingsands]

Hey all,

I'm fairly new to Live - just messing around with the demo to see if it's what I'm looking for.

I use an OpenLabs Neko keyboard workstation / PC, and have been using Brainspawn Forte to host all of my VSTs / Virtual Instruments.

Now, my band is going down a more 'electronic' route, and I was also looking for something which'll send MIDI to a VJ program (messing with Resolume) and let me sync in some live visuals.

I was wondering - what's the preferred method for setting up banks of Virtual instruments and changing the patches?

Currently I'm running a 3 x grouped tracks for loops, and a whole heap of individual external instrument tracks going to a variety of virtual instruments (a few Reason synths, 3 x Kontakt instances, Battery, B4, Elektrik Piano). This is annoying to manage as I've got a dummy clips all over the place to volup / vol down / change patches for different songs (we play around 15 songs at a gig, my rehearsal set has around 25 songs, with say 6 to 10 parts per song).

Would I be better off putting all of my virtual instruments into a single external instrument rack? If so, is there an easy way to change both instrument and patches (currently using dummy clips), and see what patch is currently active? For example, I may want to change from a B4 patch in a verse to an Eletrik piano patch in a chorus, then change Eletrik patches again to solo in the bridge. I guess at this stage I'm just not sure how dummy clips and the chain selector interact within instrument racks.

If someone could point me in the right direction, like an old thread (i've searched quite a bit) or personal experience that'd be very helpful.

Then I can attack the next issue - syncing the rest of the band with loops - sending a click to the drummer seems like the obvious option?

Cheers
onshiftingsands