Corky’s VST Organ Tips and Tweaks Page 🎹

[Sergio]

hi Torsten, hi everyone.
while waiting for the Axiom 61 to arrive, I was refining a possible single CC for the “Brake” command (Slow-Brake-Fast) of several instruments.
Recently, @Torsten, you posted the photo of the B-3X highlighting the CC 93 for me and in another post you suggested the CCs on which to intervene without many problems (those from 70 to 95).
I searched for a B-3X CC list map, but didn’t find much.

• Do you have or do you have a native B-3X CC list and possibly that of Blue3?

I ask this question to see which CCs are free for all those 4 or 5 instruments for which I would like to apply a single command (e.g. CC 95 or 92 or… free for VB3, B-3X, B5, Blue3 …)
regards
Sergio

[Corky]

Sergio

Each Hammond vst shows it’s CCs within the midi section of the plugin, so a requested list is not needed…it is there for you to see. Or, you can check your manual. Understand though, CC95 and up are usually unused, but you may need to use “suppress” option on each binding to keep it from triggering something else.

[Sergio]

Thanks, Pierrick.
Is your Axiom 1st or 2nd generation?
Sergio

[Torsten]

@Sergio

I ask this question to see which CCs are free for all those 4 or 5 instruments for which I would like to apply a single command (e.g. CC 95 or 92 or… free for VB3, B-3X, B5, Blue3 …)

I think you’re trying to be too clever here by trying to find a “universal command” across multiple instruments. It is far easier to let Cantabile do the job for you by putting your instruments in racks and then sending “standard commands” to the rack and translating them to the specific plugin inside the rack.

So let’s say you have decided that CC95 with value 127 will be your standard command for “Leslie Stop”. Now you send this command to your organ rack - whichever you decide to use within a specific song.

• In your “B3-X”, rack, you’ll have to translate this to what B3-X is expecting, which is CC93. So you create a binding inside the rack that reacts to CC95 coming into the Rack MIDI IN port and sends a CC93 to the B3-X plugin
• For VB3, things are different: VB3 needs to get a CC1 with value 63 to stop the Leslie. Accordingly, your binding inside the VB3 rack needs to send CC1 / 63 to the VB3 whenever a CC95 / 127 comes to the Rack MIDI IN port.
• Blue3 is similar to VB3, so you can copy the binding from your VB3 rack to your Blue3 rack.

So the magic is in using racks to encapsulate your plugins - far better than trying to find a CC that will play nice with multiple plugins.

Note: when you use “outside” controllers to trigger bindings in racks, you should make sure that you filter these controllers from the route from the rack MIDI In to the plugin. You don’t want these commands to do funky things to your plugin - your CC95 might be mapped to something funky in some of your organ plugins. So add a “Suppress Events” filter to the route to the plugin inside the rack and suppress all CCs that you use to trigger bindings in the rack.

Cheers,

Torsten

[Sergio]

You wrote:

• In your “B3-X”, rack, you’ll have to translate this to what B3-X is expecting, which is CC93. So you create a binding inside the rack that reacts to CC95 coming into the Rack MIDI IN port and sends a CC93 to the B3-X plugin…

It complicates me a bit … these are steps I’ve never done !! I need some explanation, perhaps starting from creating a rack up to the “CC trap” (binding inside …). Could you explain this like this?
Sergio

[Torsten]

@Sergio

Could you explain this like this?

Hey Sergio,

I’m not going to go into the mechanics of how to create a rack or a route here - @brad’s videos and guides are very good, and I don’t want to duplicate them. But here’s an example of what I mentioned above:

I created a linked rack called “B3-X Sergio”. In this rack, I have placed the plugin B3-X. This rack is within a super-simple song - just the main keyboard connected to the rack’s MIDI In and the rack’s output connected to the main speakers.

Now I go to the bindings page inside the rack and create my “stop leslie” binding:

This binding will listen to the Rack MIDI input port and wait for a CC95 to appear. The specific source binding I used is a so-called “no-edge button”. This binding will “fire” every time a CC value greater than 0 is received (see this post on details) - this is usually the best binding to use with buttons on a control keyboard.

Now once this binding is triggered, it sends a CC 93 value of 127 to the B3-X plugin - this will activate the leslie brake, as mapped in the B3-X control setup.

Now to make sure that the CC 95 we are sending to the rack doesn’t mess up anything in B3-X, we are filtering it out by using a “Suppress Events” filter on the route from the Rack MIDI In to the B3-X. Click the “Filter” icon on the route, then select “Add” and “Suppress Events”:

Now in the new dialog, you tell Cantabile to suppress all CC95 events going to the plugin:

BTW: I usually suppress a lot more in my racks, e.g. all Program Change commands going to the plugins, since I don’t want accidental PCs changing patches. I change my sounds via rack states and state behavior, so I don’t want PCs to mess things up. So usually, I allow only very few CCs to actually go to my plugins. This makes things a lot safer against accidental knob-twiddling…

Now you’re done - close the dialog, save the rack and close the rack as well. Now you have an encapsulated B3-x that you can drop into any song and that just works with your custom command CC95.

For Blue3, the binding needs to be different, since Blue3 needs a CC 1 / 63 to stop the leslie. Here’s a “Blue3 Sergio” rack with this binding:

So both racks will now stop the leslie on receiving a CC 95 - cool, huh?

Cheers,

Torsten

[Sergio]

Thanks, Torsten. I’ll try and I’ll let you know. But I will win !!!
Sergio

[dsteinschneider]

Hi Torsten,

That was a nice concise explanation. I’ve been meaning to re-do my organ racks so the brake works across B-3X, B5 and Blue3

Thanks,

Doug

[TorstenH]

I’ve made a small ReaJS script for managing my Leslie, I have a stick on my SL88 that I use as half moon, and I use two pedals, one for momentary fast and the other to toggle between slow and stop. Output is currently a CC01, as it fits my needs, but the script can easily be made generic, i.e. configurable pedal settings and more generic output, if that would be of any interest. Let me know and I’ll be happy to mend the script and share.

[Sergio]

I noticed that the Leslie Brake argument was appreciated !! the idea of ​​having the Leslie brake came to me as well as to learn the control buttons, because in several songs the Leslie has to brake very quickly and vice versa. I’m glad you liked the idea!
Sergio

[Sergio]

Hi Torsten.
Today I tried to put into practice what you explained. You are always clear in your explanations, but I go slowly with the various steps.
I must understand and not copy !! So, until I fully understand the “dynamics” of the various steps, I prefer to do the steps you created several times. After all, I had done the same with the States and now I have no problems with the States, I have “absorbed” them at best !!
I always prefer to understand and not copy !!!
Sergio

[Corky]

@Sergio

I noticed that the Leslie Brake argument was appreciated !! the idea of ​​having the Leslie brake came to me as well as to learn the control buttons, because in several songs the Leslie has to brake very quickly and vice versa. I’m glad you liked the idea!
Sergio

I use the brake a lot, especially when soloing. Other than Leslie bindings, the brake switching has always been a 1st choice part of my bindings. There are several comments in this thread about brake bindings from a few years ago, so this is not a new subject. Glad you are learning though Here are a few of the posts:

New Leslie Vst from IK Multimedia

My mod wheel, of course, runs the fast/slow. I created a parameter binding for the brake button to be assigned to my lowest key on my controller, but it could be assigned to most anything. Another beauty of C3. I haven’t tried it yet, but I would think it possible to assign the brake to mod wheel values at center. Just haven’t looked into yet.

New Leslie Vst from IK Multimedia

Hi All, There have been calls for a way to make the IK Leslie speed switch and brake switch from a single mod wheel that behaves nicely with the brake at center area of the mod wheel. @Corky first spoke of it and he was right, it can be done in C3. I got to looking at it and came up with this solution using Cantabile bindings. The first thing to consider is that you want the bindings to be the only source of CC data to the Leslie plugin so delete any automatically created input routes from the…

Cantabile Webinars - Video Replays

@terrybritton … thanks. I got my first abstraction rack up and running yesterday. Small one, just covers the piano pedals (sustain, soft, sostenuto), but soft and sostenuto doubles as leslie fast/slow and brake, so really a neat way to handle these when having both piano and hammond in the song. That was a nice trick to learn.

Leslie Half Moon Switch for Arturia - Weekend Project

As a Hammond guy, I’m so used to playing organ with a half-moon Leslie switch that I hate playing without one, so I usually try to engineer something to retrofit to all my live keyboards. My current gigging board is an Arturia Keylab 88 Essential, a great board but the Mod wheel is located at the extreme top left of the keyboard and that’s just too out of the way for Leslie switching, especially when you’re also playing bass with the left. [keylab-essential-88-image] On this keyboard I decide…

[Sergio]

Hi Torsten
It doesn’t seem to work: on the bindings, under the Action column, I see that you have transcribed Controllers and immediately after there is the value 127, but in the drop-down menu I don’t see it written as you indicate it. I also tried with CC but it doesn’t work anyway. Why? I should have followed all the instructions.
Sergio

[Sergio]

This is the saved screen
Sergio

[Torsten]

Hey Sergio,

if you are asking for help and posting screenshots here, it would be helpful if you set your Cantabile language to English - difficult to decipher the Italian in your screenshot…

Still, your binding seems OK (I assume the Event means “Controller (no edge button)”, right? The Action is correctly set to CC93, val 127, so that should be good. It just seems that the Italian translation of Cantabile has “CC” in the dropdown menu instead of “Controller” as the English version does. Again, I’d recommend to set your Cantabile to English, given that you communicate with the forum a lot. Far easier if everybody sees the same thing on their screens…

Have you tried clicking the “play” button (triangle on the left side of the binding) - this should cause the leslie to stop right away.

Now on the other dialog where you are setting the on-screen button: be aware that these on-screen buttons don’t send to “Main Keyboard” - they always send to “Onscreen Keyboard”. This means that you’ll have to also create a route from “Onscreen Keyboard” to your B3-X MIDI In.

Alternatively, you could also create a binding in the background rack that automatically re-routes all output from the onscreen keyboard so that it looks as if it came from the Main Keyboard:

That way, you don’t need to create extra routes from Onscreen Keyboard in every song. To do this, you’ll have to activate these two checkboxes in Cantabile’s settings:

Cheers,

Torsten

[Sergio]

I’m sorry Torsten, to view Cantabile in English is it sufficient to delete the .JSON file?
So I get in line with you, then, calmly, I will restore my Italian …
Sergii

[cpaolo]

Sergio,

Just rename strings-it.json to something like strings-it.jsonX and restart Cantabile. Doing that, you easily switch between Italian and English and vice versa.

[Sergio]

Thanks you, Grazie Paolo

[Sergio]

Hey Torsten.
I changed the language to Cantabile to English and checked the string which I thought was dubious, but it was spelled well.
I also flagged the two items in Advanced as you suggested.
I also clicked on the triangle at the top left. But the Brake does not work, it is not activated.
I wanted to clarify that I am using the controller buttons: maybe with these buttons the Leslie stop does not work? or did I skip any steps?
Sergio

[Torsten]

@Sergio

I wanted to clarify that I am using the controller buttons: maybe with these buttons the Leslie stop does not work? or did I skip any steps?

Hey Sergio,

as I wrote above: when you use the Controller Bar buttons, they send their output to the MIDI port “Onscreen Keyboard”. So you’ll need to route the input from “Onscreen Keyboard” to your organ rack as well, otherwise it will not receive the commands from the buttons.

Forget about the advanced settings for the moment; let’s make sure we get this to work on the basics: Create a new route (in addition to the one from Main Keyboard to B-3X Sergio) from Onscreen Keyboard to B-3X Sergio. Then check if the onscreen button works to stop the Leslie.

If things don’t work, maybe try a MIDI monitor - first on the rack to understand what is being sent to the rack: right-click the rack and select as shown below

Now you can see what happens to the rack when you press the onscreen button. There should be a CC95/127 going into the rack. If not, something is wrong with the routing between your onscreen button and the rack.

Next we go to the organ itself, so go into the rack and create a MIDI Monitor from the organ plugin:

Now you can see what events come into your organ plugin - if the binding works, you should be getting CC93/127 events.

Once we have all this working, we can get to the more complex stuff, including the Background Rack…

I suspect that you are currently biting off a bit more than you can chew - this is pretty advanced stuff. So really take your time and make sure you learn and truly digest all the concepts around this. There will be some experimenting, troubleshooting and debugging involved. But that’s how you learn Cantabile - I’ve been working with Cantabile for more than 6 years now, and I’m still learning every day…

Cheers,

Torsten