Hey all, I’m setting up Cantabile for a four-piece band that includes me (vox and guitar), a bassist, a drummer and a keys/synth player.
My question is this, what is the most efficient way to have unique monitor mixes for each person? We use an interface with 4 mono outputs routed to a headphone amp, so do I need to just sum all of our inputs into a single plugin/rack four separate times and then send that out to the four outputs? I’m just trying to make it as streamlined and as easy as possible because some of the guys are not very computer savvy and they might want to just grab their individual plugin/rack from time to time and turn something up or down.
EDIT: I wanted to add we are currently doing this in Ableton Live through separate sends/returns for each output and it is a convoluted, frustrating and unreliable mess that almost always derails rehearsal at some point to fix some mysterious issue with one person’s mix or another not working correctly and it’s obtuse and difficult to understand. I have been using Cantabile at home for individual practice and have found that its much more intuitive and rock-solid-reliable, so I want to migrate our rehearsals to it.
If I understand you the whole 4 piece combo is routing through Cantabile for at the least some audio processing. I’m also assuming that the VST instruments are being handled there and that the PC is connected via USB to an interface with 4 discreet output channels.
Based on that understanding I suggest that create a separate output audio port for each output of your interface in the Cantabile audio port configuration in Options. Then in each Song you make you can control the mix of each rack or plugin to each of the 4 outs by creating audio output routes on the rack or plugin that correspond to your ports you made in Options. If you need help with it let us know.
Thank you for the warm welcome, I’ve been loving this program and what I see out of the community thus far, and I’ve been lurking this forum quite a bit to learn what I can and come to grips with Cantabile. So, what you’re saying then, is that each individual plugin should have a volume control for each of its outputs? If so, then I suppose my purchase of Waves’ CLA MixHub was likely superfluous. Where can I find this control, I couldn’t seem to locate it in the plugin window, would I need to basically sum each input’s plugins into a rack and then have that or am I overthinking this?
For reference, here’s how I have it set up currently.
With this set up and CLA MixHub, each input has a post-effects EQ and then goes to a separate instance of MixHub that looks like this for each person’s monitor mix, but if I can get around using this, I will, because after preloading plugins for a 7-8 song setup, this is going to be very resource intensive and we all know simple and reliable go hand-in-hand.
Each channel’s post EQ:
This part is necessary to be able to assign each track to a “bucket” within MixHub, so that their levels can be adjusted within that instance of the plugin.
After looking at your pictures I am saying that on each VST or rack you create multiple output routes that are sent directly to the hardware output ports you have named with each player and loose the Waves stuff. In this example you see the wiring diagram view.
The default is that the gain levels are saved per song so each separate mix is saved along with the song as a rule. If you have Solo or Performer you can also also alter the gain level for each state in the song. It doesn’t give separate Eq for each port though so it might not fit your needs.
The EQ is less important and you just simplified this whole set up for me so much! Thank you. This makes perfect sense now. So I just have the stereo out from each plugin/rack for each input and then adjust the gain for its stereo out per route to each output. This is so nice. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Another quick question if you don’t mind, in reference to set lists. How do I load the plugins that are shared between songs as singular instances instead of it loading each one as an individual instance of the plugin? There’s only a few places where we’ll be using anything different in like one or two songs, and it seems crazy to take approximately 15-20 plugins and turn them into 100+ when preloading the set.
For that you need to have the Performer version I think . To save instances of plugin load in memory you place the plugins inside a “linked” rack. That way they only load in memory once and are usable across songs in a set list. Last but not least if you have Performer with those features you have you go to the set lists pane upper right corner and open the hamburger menu with a left click. Select Pre-Load and Cantabile will load all the Racks, Media Players and plugins into memory for fast loading. You can also create a template song to cut down on replication of keystrokes.
“save as” automatically converts the embedded rack to a linked rack and replaces the embedded one you formally had in the song. It also makes it available to add as an existing linked rack in other new songs.
He certainly sorted me directly out, I now have our super light set… uh, set, and running like a top while using less than 2 GB of memory. This is fantastic. Thank you, so much, Dave.
