I am trying to control the timing of a message being sent to a tabplay~. the message is a [set( message. is there an object that will store this and output it via bang in the same way [float] does for numbers? I've tried using [symbol] but it seems not to work.

yes, the [set( message will prepare an empty [ ( message object with your desired message but not pass it through until you hit it with a bang

Is this what you mean?

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/settingmessage.pd