MIDI Device manager: help please!

Cubase
1

Hi, I’ve not used Cubase for while and just upgraded to 7.5 - my memory is a little hazy. If someone could help me out with this, it would be much appreciated:

I wanted to create an ‘instrument’ so my synth (Elektron Analog Keys) takes up on track, rather than separate midi & audio which is how I do it in Reason, and how I used to do it in Cubase.

I’ve made a new device with ‘midi device manager’ , made an ‘external instrument’ in VST connections and routed them together. So far, so good - I have and instrument named ‘Analog Keys’ which I can record MIDI into, and when I export the song, it writes the audio for that track. That’s what I wanted…

…However, now I want to add another track with a part on a different midi channel. The synth has 4 parts. But when I go to add another instrument, it’s not there on the list, as I’ve already used it. I can only use it once.I tried to make another midi device, but the audio outputs are unavailable, as they are already routed to the first device I made.

Can someone please explain what the workflow should be here - I appreciate I may be doing this all totally wrong, I know I should RTFM, but I figure I’m very close and someone might be able to nudge me in the right direction?! :slight_smile:

2

It’s true that once you load your hardware synth as an external instrument, you can’t load it a second time. This makes sense if you consider the output on your keyboard is already occupied. It’s the same using instrument tracks or instrument rack.
You can however add a MIDI track in your project and assign it to the same instrument with the next midi channel and you are good to go. Of course, you are still sharing the same audio line. I usually record the midi parts to separate audio tracks.

3

Thanks, that what I used to do, I was just hoping for a more streamlined workflow!

4

It is one of the Little conceptual flaws in Cubase to NOT allow reuse of an external synth.

But you can create one MIdi Device per Audio Output of the device - which makes things strange but a Little bit easier in Terms of workflow.

I would prefer to have cubase allow multiple instances of the same external synth. It would make things easier in Terms of workflow.

Generally speaking it is NOT always the best Software design decision to simply mimic the behaviour of “real Counterparts”.

Cheers, Ernst

5

So if I choose to output my Analog Keys 4 track’s on separate outputs, this might be a good idea… but at the moment, while I’m outputting all four tracks out the main output, I guess I’m better off using separate MIDI channels and separate audio tracks - 8 tracks in total! Just a bit cluttered :frowning: