I am a bit confused on how to make Cantabile work for me. Here is a general idea of what I typically do.
4-5 song set list
Each songs has 2-4 different sounds
I use 2 midi keyboards (88 key semi weighted and 61 key synth action) - one of which has knobs, faders and pads for playing sounds
Once the song is set up I will need it to hold all plugins and settings. I currently have 100 songs with specific synth lead parts, ambient pads and specialized sounds. These 100 songs make a set list to perform 4-6 times a month.
I don’t really like setting up songs with states for the intro, verse, chorus ect. I would rather create a song with all the sounds and program the sounds to the different midi keyboards and the pads on my Nektar P6 midi keyboard.
Here is what I have figured out:
I have figured out how to create a song and add all my VSTi’s.
I have figured out how to change the input ports to play a plugin on only 1 of my midi keyboards.
How do I create splits within Cantabile V3. I need a plugin to only play within a certain key range. This becomes necessary when I have a 3rd and 4th sound in a song. These extra sounds are little 3 and 4 note parts that I would like set to play on the pads or the upper/lower end of the keyboard.
Is there an easy way to do this and will these settings be save for the song?
No bother at all - glad you found what you’re after.
The only note that I’d add is to consider setting up your sounds in rack files and then re-use those racks across songs. That’ll give you option down the track to turn on set list pre-loading and re-use the same plugin instances across all 100 songs - and give you faster song switching times.
why not use the excellent “show notes” feature for this. I usually simply put in a note like “brass sound above C6”, but of course you can go crazy and use a colored keyboard as a JPG image.
OK, will be a bit of work to create the JPG, but I guess it will be far more powerful than anything that could be generated automatically. Especially once the complexity of your routing section explodes: I often have more than 10 routes active, since I usually create separate routes for MIDI notes and controllers, plus multiple routes for layering. Would be kind of difficult for Cantabile to guess which ones I’d like to have colored in my overview.
Have you tried Show Notes yet? I absolutely love this feature.
There’s a trello card for it here, but it hasn’t seen many votes, but I’ve moved it to my list of things to focus on next week.
That said I seem to remember there was some technical reason why I didn’t implement it at the time - but that was very early on and I’m hopefully past that particular problem now (but I’ll need to check).
Yeah I think I agree with the OP…trying to set up splits on one rack is doing my head in! I think I will stick with C2 - C3 is WAY to complicated for this old head!
Me too…it’s probably a familiarity thing rather than a complexity thing. I actually find C3 more straightforward (once I got my head around racks/routes), and certainly clearer to see what’s going on. The buses behind the scenes in C2 always added to the confusion for me. If you stick with C3, I bet fairly quickly it’ll all fall into place.
seems like there are too many steps - like with C2 I was up and running with multi vst setups and splits and transposing etc etc within about 15 minutes…I found it all quite intuitive. C3 requires a whole new way of working! well that’s the way it seems to me.
I have nearly 200 different setups registered with C2 and even when getting them into C3, there is still multiple setup work to get them to play properly - haha I don’t like change, but I want the added stability of C3…
Just have to stick with it I guess…maybe the light will shine one day. In the interim C2 is the go to
yep -the whole racks and routes thing is one of the main things - I am running a keyboard (multi channel) and a nanokontrol (for all the live dynamic edits)
As you have likely been discovering - you needn’t pause for a moment to ask questions here at the community. A great bunch of helpful folks are here!
Yeah…to that end I have moved the C3 install over to my main PC - I have created the same folder environment I have on the laptop for this purpose, so I can really come to grips with it, and leave C2 humming along until such time etc etc
I will save “songs” and such, and as the folders are the same I should be able to simply migrate it all over to the gig laptop when ready.
Well, a tiny step for you guys, but a giant one for me hahaha! Got my first song setup today with splits, and separate channels and all,even got the Nanokontrol working too… and I think I am “getting” how C3 is operating. It is slowly starting to make sense
Good to hear. I think the consensus is that it takes a bit of mindset change to move to v3, but once that happens I don’t think anyone has looked back.