Changing instrument patches, sort of

This may be a no brainer for most of you, but it scratched me where I itched, so I thought I'd put it up.  It might not even be in the right forum, but since I'm using Producer 8.5, I thought I'd start it here.
 
Remember the good old days when you could put a controller in the Event list of MIDI instrument and change it to a different instrument voice?  Then came the better new days with the gorgeous synths using genuine instrument samples and things got a lot prettier sound-wise, but made my music writing messier.  Let's say I'm using Garritan Personal Orchestra and I want a lush violin part at the beginning, pizzicato in the middle, and back to lush at the end.  Up til now I thought I had to have 2 different tracks, 1 for lush and 1 for pizzicato, and then I had to write 2 different parts in staff view.
 
However, I found that if, in Track view, I set the output of a MIDI instrument to my Garritan synth and the track to "None," then the MIDI notes play back according to whatever channel I assign them in the staff view.  For example, my lush strings are assigned to channel 6 on the Garritan synth and pizzicato is assigned to channel 7.  When I write my music in staff view, I just make sure that the notes for my lush parts are assigned to channel 6 and the notes for my pizzicato parts are assigned to channel 7.  One part, one line of music, 2 different styles.  Neat!

As usual, there are the "nice but..." aspects, which I am finding more of as I go along.  For example, if you use 2 or more different channels in the same line (like my example above) and you want to use any of the Garritan controllers on them, you have to use separate controllers for each channel.  In the above example, I have to use a volume controller for channel 6 and one for channel 7 and  a mod wheel controller for each also.  I tend to use envelopes, which has its advantages and drawbacks, but I can see it's not going to be as simple as I first thought.