Hello.
I am a choir conductor and we are preparing some OST. I need to make a Mockup of some themes to use as playbacks.
The songs I need are: Hymn to the Fallen (Save Private Ryan), Dry Your Tears Afrika (Friendship movie) and On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Mission)
I use Cubase and Kontakt as a virtual instrument.
I use libraries with Keyswiches like the Cinematic Studio series…
My computer is a Windows with I7 14700k, 64 GB of RAM, 2x 1GB SSD and Steinberg UR44 as a sound card.
There goes the question:
I want to make an orchestral template and I have several possibilities:
1.- Have a Kontakt instance for each instrument, and therefore an associated MIDI track.
2.- Open several KONTAKT outputs for each instrument family and assign MIDI channels to each instrument and Kontakt output.
Here I have a doubt:
If you open a Kontakt virtual instrument and create, for example, 4 KONTAKT audio outputs (st1, st2, st3, st4). The st1 is usually the Kontakt instance itself. It assigns MIDI channels to the instruments and assigns audio outputs st1, st2… to each MIDI. The problem is that the first one (st1) will always be the KONTAKT instance created. So if you assign ST1 to the piccolo and change its name… when I click on the piccolo, the KONTAK instance of the assigned woods will appear. (I don’t know if I explain myself). What is usually done…? Do I create an instance of KONTAKT called WOODS, and leave the KONTAKT st1 audio channel free so that it keeps the name WOODS… and use the st2 audio for piccolo, the st3 for flutes…?
3.- Another form of organization that you tell me.
regards
This will answer all your questions. You have concrete examples.
I would try where possible to use instrument tracks, one for each Kontakt instance.
I’ve tried all ways round in the past - midi tracks feeding instruments, midi tracks feeding VEPro and returning single, or multiple audio returns, and multiple outs from Kontakt directly in cubase and every time I always come back to instrument tracks. I just find that it’s less complicated and when working with lots of tracks in an orchestral template (you can easily end up with hundreds) you want to keep things as simple as possible.
I also have expression maps set up but that’s to help with articulations on hand when composing .
Why want to create midi tracks
if you use keyswitches
simply create deactivated instrument tracks and activate them as needed
For me I created a mix of both
keyswitch tracks and individual tracks
the second solution allowing you to use fewer resources
because when you have around ten articulations loaded in a kontakt instance you will in reality only use between 3 and 5 around.
Afterwards the advantage if you are on Kontakt 7 is to be able to purge all the instances at once
Strongly concur. And there’s no real performance advantage to using a single instance of Kontakt to play multiple Instruments rather than each Instrument having its own instance - i.e. one instance of Kontakt playing 8 voices is not more efficient than using 8 instances of Kontakt each playing a single voice. Plus it greatly simplifies Project organization, management and mixing.