>>Could you put an inlet in the subpatch that takes a loadbang-$0 from the abstraction into a "set $1-" message to set its tabwrites and tabreads?<< yeah, you don't even need to do that , you can put the $0 directly in the tabread / write ..ie [tabread4~ $0-blahblah] all works well now. thanks for the help frank and chuckk