Sub-group for plugins or racks

[Torsten]

@Mistheria

I didn’t understand this part of your setup…

yes, that one is a bit complex…

The general idea is to de-couple my song setups from the actual configuration of my hardware controllers. When I buy a new masterkeyboard, I don’t want to have to re-design all my songs and racks, just because that one has different faders and buttons assigned to different MIDI CCs.

So I created a couple of abstraction layers that “translate” between the actual hardware and the way I use it in my songs.

There are a number of very informative discussion threads on this - too much to repeat here, but useful links are:

Designing New Virtual Rack- best way?

I use separate conversion racks inside my background rack for that. I have an abstract MIDI port called “BG rack” that handles all my sliders, knobs, faders etc. No physical device is connected to this MIDI port directly; it is fed by the conversion racks inside my background rack. Now the first thing I did was to create “standardized” controllers that feed into my songs from the BG rack, e.g. keys master volume, guitar master volume, main level volume, solo volume, main reverb level, solo rev…

Designing New Virtual Rack- best way?

So if you really want to dive into that end of the pool, here are some more pointers on how I’ve organized my setup for maximum flexibility and portability. In previous incarnations, I tried to get all my various controller keyboards to behave similarly, i.e. get them to use the same CCs, but that became impractical with some hardware, so I thought I’d weed these dependencies out completely. Here’s an overview of what things look like in my setup: [grafik] In my setup, I have two kinds of MI…

This here is the high-level logic:

within my background rack, there are “conversion racks” that use the input from my hardware controllers and convert it to “standardized” controllers that I then can use in my songs. The output of these conversion racks is then sent via the loopback function to some Cantabile MIDI ports. I call these “abstract MIDI ports”, because they aren’t connected to any hardware input, but act as an abstract MIDI device like “Pedals”, “Drumpads” or “Drawbars”. Another one is the abstract device “BG Rack”, which collects all my standard controllers that aren’t pedals, drumpads or drawbars. Stuff like “main volume”, “solo volume”, “reverb level” etc, but also “commands” like “start scrolling LivePrompter”.

These abstract MIDI ports are then used by my racks in my songs.

This way, whenever I add or change a hardware controller, I simply build a new conversion rack in my background rack (or modify an existing one) to direct its signals to my abstract MIDI ports in a useful way. All my racks and songs stay unchanged.

I used to have abstract MIDI ports for my keyboards as well, but due to the fact that using loopback incurs additional latency, I created a shortcut for the time-critical events (notes, pitch-bend, aftertouch, modwheel). See the upper part of the graph (Main Keyboard and Second Keyboard). These specific events are used directly from the hardware MIDI port and just encapsulated in a standard input rack that I use within my songs. The input rack uses MIDI filters so it only gets the time critical events and supplies them to the song.

You can see my input racks in my screenshots in the first posts: they are at the top: “_MainKeyboard” and “_SecondKeyboard”.

I admit, this is super-complex - but it has helped me a lot in keeping my setup consistent, and it has helped me add new stuff to the setup easily without messing up everything else…

Cheers,

Torsten