VEP using Instrument Tracks

I have set up VEP as an instrument track and enabled all the outputs. However I am unable to access those outputs using other instrument tracks. I know I can use midi tracks, but I don’t want to have separate midi and Audio tracks for each output. Is there a way to use instrument tracks for each channel of a VEP instance?

You can make one instrument track and then additional midi tracks, which all send midi to the instrument in the instrument track. Make sure the midi channels on those additional midi tracks are set to what you want/need.

Hi Nico, yes this is what I’m doing now. But as I mentioned I would prefer to have one instrument track for each channel as opposed to using midi tracks. Cause with midi tracks I then have to have a corresponding audio track for it so I can add inserts. I would prefer to just use an instrument track for each channel so I can add the inserts directly. Is this possible?

You could always make multiple instrument tracks, each with a separate instance of VEP?

Hi Nico, can you please explain how this is possible? Once I assign a VEP instrument track to an instance, that instance is no longer available for any other track. Are you saying to create a separate VEP instance for each instrument? Wouldn’t that take up a lot of processing/mem?

It’s one way of doing it and some orchestral plugins need to be done that way anyway, because they aren’t multi-instrument plugins. How much extra CPU and RAM that takes depends on the plugin (I don’t have VEP, so I don’t know how efficient it is).

However, an advantage of doing it that way, is that your orchestra gets distributed amongst the multiple cores and threads of your CPU.

The other way of getting it done is to have one instrument track fed by several midi inputs and outputting several audio outputs - and you just making sure via midi channel assignments that each midi input matches with one audio output. When doing it that way, the audio outputs show up as separate mixer channels, where you can insert different plugins or have different audio settings for each channel. But you can’t control those from their midi channels.

Or you could do a combination of the above approaches. For example only having 4 midi inputs and 4 audio outputs per VEP instance. And if your orchestra has 12 sections, you’d use 3 instances of VEP.

Since I don’t have VEP, I’ve never looked, but there may be some Cubase templates floating around online, where you could steal some ideas of how others are routing VEP midi and audio in Cubase.

Also, vi-control is a popular forum for orchestral composers including Cubase users, where you may get more orchestral specific ideas.