I am new to Cubase and to get started got myself a license for Cubase Elements 6. I have a nice Midi controller (Akai MPK) but I can’t make it work the way I want to.
Want I want to do is the following:
I use VST instruments as my sound source and want to control more than one of them at the same time (playing live). I can split my keyboard to send on midi Channel 1 (lower section) and channel 2 (higher section). In addition I have the pads that send on yet another midi channel.
In Cubase Elements 6 however I do not manage to configure my tracks/vst instruments in a way that they would play only events from a single midi channel. It works for the Halion Sonic SE that comes with Cubase, within the instrument I can assign different sounds to different midi channels. Other VST instruments (say Prologue), however seem to respond to all channels.
Is there a way in Cubase to send only a certain midi channel to the VST instrument?
What you should do, is to create MIDI or Instrument track for every MIDI channel. Then insert MIDI filter plugin to the track to filter out MIDI messages from undesired channels. Unfortunately CE6 has no stock MIDI filter plugin, but you can always find some free 3rd party ones. Here’s one example: Loading...
Other way to approach your problem is to install a virtual MIDI driver, which can split MIDI stream based on channel information to different virtual MIDI input ports. I don’t remember if MIDI Yoke (http://www.midiox.com/) can do this or not.
EDIT: Ouch! Just checked it out … CE6 doesn’t even support MIDI plugins. It looks like the second approach is your way to go.
I fiddled around with Midiox and other tools but to not much luck (the tool seems to be a bit dated and I am on 64 Windows 7). Since this is not a midi-ox forum I’ll spare the details but it seemed I need two instances of Midiox to filter into two different virtual midi devices. The second instance however didn’t connect with input on my system.
Unless somebody can exactly explain how to use midiex in my environment I would alternatively consider upgrading my Cubase. What I can’t find is the one sheet that tells me the differences of all the Cubase versions. So what would be the right version to use and can I upgrade without paying extra…?