And we still have not heard why a user with rudimentary knowledge of the most popular sample playback VSTi, Kontakt’, cannot dial the required velocity sensitivity in.
The comparison being made with a hardware rig is mystifying to me. A dedicated workstation from one manufacturer, with a fixed architecture, can achieve precisely what that a workstation based on a computer and your choice of midi controllers cannot?
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But your hardware synth WILL somehow have the missing instrument? I’m not following the logic here.
Which is more likely, that a software environment, which has contributions from literally thousands of developers around the world, is not going to produce the missing instrument that a hardware manufacturer, who needs to sell you a complete new workstation every couple of years, is going to update your out of date hardware with the sound you’re looking for?
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OK I think maybe I’m talking a bit nonsense due to my lack of experience.
I only had my first digital keyboard 3 years ago, and before that I played on acoustic pianos only for 10 years.
Just two questions that will help me to understand the situation:
- Do you people play live with your bands VIs of brass, woodwinds, strings, and\or others, without velocity sensitivity, and with extensive usage of epxression pedal\modwheel\breath controller for dynamics control?
- Do you think that with enough practice I can develop technique of expression pedal\modwheel\breath controller usage for dynamics control, up to a level that I could perfectly control dynamics through expression pedal\modwheel\breath controller and it would feel natural for me?
If the answers are yes, I think I’m willing to try to develop a new playing technique, that suits to those many virtual instruments, and then, problem solved.
I just want you to know that I highly regard your opinions, you people have much more experience than me, and I really don’t have anyone in the real world to consult about those things, my music teacher only play on acoustic pianos and barely know something about digital keyboards.
You should also be able to use keyboard velocity sensitivity as well, which after all can be considered to be another source of modulation/expression. The question is for your soft synths/libraries of choice is how well they have been programmed to respond to modulation sources and you may need to go digging into the settings to get what you want.
You can find similar issues on hardware synths as well. Many synths have aftertouch, but often few patches are programmed to respond to it.
I think it is always a good thing to add to your toolbox. Learning to use expression pedal and/or breath controller will allow you to be much more expressive with your brass and ochestral parts. The only other option for articulation control would be key switches, which I find impossible to use live. I am always playing some other instrument with my other hand.
For instance, I may have piano on my lower keyboard with the expression pedal bringing in orchestra behind it, while my top keyboard is a saxophone or a brass line with my breath controller providing expression. I may have to play this one leaning on a stool so I can use both feet, but the sound is amazing.
If you are making first steps into using VST-Instruments live, I’d recommend a “crawl-walk-run”-approach - start simple and expand upward.
It makes little sense to start with the monster-gigabyte-libraries when making your first steps; I’d rather recommend you start with some general-purpose softsynths - the equivalent to any hardware workstation.
One of the best candidates would be the JV-1080 from the Roland Cloud - these sounds have been in 1000s of serious productions, so they’ll take you pretty far. Alternatives are the M1 from the Korg Legacy collection or Xpand2. All of these will give you a broad range of “bread-and-butter” sounds (including accordion 
)
Next, see where you want to go deeper or where the quality of specific sounds of these instruments doesn’t satisfy you. Given that you come from a piano background, you’ll probably want something better on the piano side, so take a look at Pianoteq, Addictive Keys or Ravenscroft, to name a few favorites.
If you want to improve your electric piano sounds, take a look at Lounge Lizard (not sample-based) or Velvet before possibly moving on to more extensive sample libraries like Scarbee’s Classic EP 88.
Or, if you want to experiment with classic subtractive synthesis, go for virtual analogs like Diva, Hive, Repro-5 from u-he or (for a more modern approach) the Avenger from Vengeance Sound.
I would only go for the bigger sample libraries if you reeeeeealllly need the quality and breadth of sound. Massive RAM usage and loading time are not something you’ll want to accumulate in a live rig. So try to do 90% with your bread&butter, then add very few others.
Most of my brass sounds (for classic rock brass section phrases) are from a simple M1 patch called “tight brass” - good enough for “Sweet Home Chicago” brass phrases. I use Session Horns only when brass sounds are more prominent in the arrangement. And yes, for most of my brass use cases, I use key velocity as my only control.
You’ll only need the big sample libraries when you get to solo use; but then you’d also need a breath controller or something similar to really play them authentically.
Same applies to strings or other sounds: most live uses in a mix can be easily covered with the bread&butter sounds; so far I haven’t seen the need for any massive string library; so far, I was able to cover all I needed from my three bread&butter plugins (M1, JV-2080, Xpand2!). And again - all of these sounds are purely velocity-based (with a bit of aftertouch for modulating brightness).
So if “one day you need a specific sound” on the spot, it is most likely that you’ll find it in one of these three beasts - and in a quality at least good enough for a rehearsal. Then once you get home after the rehearsal, you’ll be able to fine-tune or - if you really need - find a specialist plugin to replace the bread&butter.
Do yourself a favor, start out with a small set of efficient instruments and work your way outward. It just doesn’t make sense in a live context to try to cover every possible sound base with a massive specialized sample library - you’ll want a “good-enough” flexible setup that lets you get the job done!
Cheers,
Torsten
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So… basically, what I said 
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Torsten, if I’m going to use the sounds of Korg M1 most of the time, which is a hardware keyboard from 1988, why not going with hardware rig and that’s it?
What are the advantages of software over hardware, if not suprior contemporary sounds?
My appologize if my question is provoke, I really ask innocently, I want to understand what’s going on in keyboards scene.
I can only answer this from my personal perspective - others will have other reasons to move to a software setup, but for me the key motivation was not sound quality, but convenience and configurability.
Before moving to a laptop-based setup, I had a setup consisting of a Kurzweil PC3K8, a Yamaha Motif XF, a Ferrofish B4000+ for Hammond sounds (which I wasn’t happy about on the other boards), a Neo Instruments Ventilator for Leslie, plus a Pod HD 500 for my guitar sounds. Great sounds, but a lot of work to set up, tear down and transport. And I needed separate setups for studio use at home and for the rehearsal rooms, so I actually had to have two of the more unwieldy pieces to avoid having to go through the full setup every week in rehearsal.
Nowadays, I have my full setup on my studio PC, a full mirror of it on two laptops (live and backup), and I can simply show up anywhere with a laptop bag that contains my live laptop, and audio interface and a MIDI interface, and I can play my “single keyboard” setup on any MIDI keyboard that happens to be available on site. Well, for worst cases, I’ll bring a fader controller and a pedal interface with an expression pedal if there is really only a MIDI piano there (need my EXP pedal and some faders). Setup time is neglegible, and I always have my trusted sounds and setups at my fingertips.
What - I need to do guitar as well? Simply drag along my Variax, plug it into my audio interface, and I’m ready for almost anything (that my fingers and my brain-to-finger-interface will allow…).
So that’s the convenience part of it all - nowadays I have a simply 88 key MIDI master keyboard sitting in the rehearsal room for one of my projects. I arrive with a little 49 key controller in one hand and my laptop bag in the other, take 5 minutes to connect and am ready for rehearsal - and I have all the latest changes and additions to my setup that I just made in my studio all ready to play.
Next for the configurability part: Cantabile (Performer) is just a monster in terms of being able to create customized setups for individual songs. Slapping together sounds from different VST instruments, adding effects like EQ, reverb, delay etc across the whole bunch, then creating different configurations of these instruments and effects for every part of a song and calling them up at the touch of a friendly red button is soooo powerful!
No more need for cheat sheets like “lower: C13 (Piano & strings), upper: bank E, patch 99 (famous brass), on chorus switch upper to F13 (analog lead) and use fader E to pull up delay” to get ready for every song - I simply load up the song and everything is ready to play. I can concentrate on making music instead of operating machinery.
Next: Cantabile makes it ridiculously easy to combine and change things in your setup. Not happy with my piano sound? I simply use a different instrument plugin in my piano rack - and all my songs using that rack will automatically use the new one. Want to add a great analog-style synth to my arsenal for a solo part in a song? OK, I’ll create a new “Diva” rack and add it where necessary.
With a hardware setup, this would mean adding new physical hardware to your setup (that you need to shlep to gigs and connect) or (in the case of replacing one of your core sounds like piano) re-building and re-learning all your setups. None of that in a Cantabile setup.
Lastly, it IS also about sound quality - on the selected instruments where I really need it. I’m super-happy with the sounds of Velvet for E-Piano, Addictive Keys for piano, and VB-3 and Blue3. And I haven’t heard a better amp simulator than Mike Scuffham’s S-Gear. So on selected sounds, I am very picky about sound quality, whereas for those sounds that aren’t as prominent, I’m quite happy with bread&butter.
Cheers,
Torsten
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@Torsten: How do you mirror your setup? Is it a dropbox sync (or familiar) or do you do it with a clone-application and mirror the whole HDD / SSD?
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@FantomXR: I use dropbox to sync songs, racks and a few samples.
For the rest (plugins, libraries) unfortunately just manual duplication. Since my studio machine has far more plugs and libraries installed than my leaner live machine, there’s no mileage in any sync or cloning tools.
But since songs / racks change far more frequently than plugins, I can live with that.
One thing I’m missing is a tool that could read out the version number of all installed plugins on my machines and do a delta analysis for version differences. That would be helpful for keeping plugins at current versions. Anyone know of such a tool?
Cheers,
Torsten
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Hey Torsten, I thought deeply about your answer to my question “why you prefer software over hardware”.
Firstly I want to say I’m thankful for your thoughtful answers.
Just one question:
When you come only with your laptop to play with the single keyboard that available on the site, if the keyboard has no modwheel and pitchbend wheels, how do you overcome this?
For faders and stuff you have Korg Nanokontrol, but there is no pitchbend+modulation wheels Nanokontrolers on the market, as far as I know.
So I gues you only use expression pedal for modulation(I know there are third party expression pedal on the market)?
And what about pitchbend? Is pitchbend wheel simply not useful for you and you just get along without it? Or you have some solution for that?
I’ll jump in with my own answer on that- if they don’t have a controller with a pitchbend wheel (and I specify a wheel) I don’t show up. It’s really the least they can do. But if you’re not in a situation to be a diva like that there are alternatives- One would be, get a cheap little controller like THIS:
I’ve seen them for $60 used. Then you have controllers for pitch, mod, keyswitching, you have knobs, pads, all that you can map to the big keyboard you’re playing.
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Hey guys I think that the big problem is different than what I thought in the beginning.
Yes my playing is style is that I like to play with velocity sensitive instruments(although I don’t want a velocity sensitive accordion anymore), but the real problem is that some VIs is more live performance oriented(and usually those do have a velocity sensitivity possibility), and some are completely for studio and doesn’t meant for live performance.
And the problem is that most of the times you don’t know whether the VI is works for you before you try it, and most of those VIs don’t have a trail version so you can’t try them before you buy them, and they are expensive.
But I do the beleive that there are many VIs that can work for my playing style and can give me all the sounds I’ll ever want and need for live playing, I just don’t know them.
That’s why the internet is your friend.
There are ample ways to research and see plugins in operation. And you also have the benefit of discussion groups like this forum and the other big sites like Gearslutz. You have more access to answers, and less financial risk than you ever had with expensive hardware.
If you’re playing live, you want to be practical and not be loading a scoring template with a terabyte of samples.
The wonderful thing about this Cantabile world is that if we don’t like a plugin we don’t have to throw away the entire keyboard. Doesn’t that make it look a little more attractive as a concept? 
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Ade, yeah, but it seems that there are not many who use software live, most of the keyboardists go hardware.
Like, I’m going to Keyboard Corner forum asking about VIs for live performance, and barely getting answers, or I’m getting irrelevant answers(getting answers about VIs for studio instead), because 90% of that forum are hardware guys.
So all in all, you don’t have many people to ask about VIs for live performance, and get good answers.
I think the biggest obstacle to adopting the software approach IS the huge number of options. The restricted choices available on a keyboard can actually feel safer, easier to deal with. Looking out into that vast ocean of possibility can be frightening for someone coming from the relatively restricted hardware world.
I found this forum to be invaluable in my search for sonic love. Here is a group of seasoned professionals who between them have probably used just about every major VST out there. Need a good organ sound? A quick search on the forum will reveal several in depth discussions. Analog synths? Same deal. Best thing is the assumed focus here is always live playability.
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No Nanocontrol here, I use a Novation Launch Control. It’s easy to use bindings to convert the controller messages it sends to modulation (just a different CC number) or pitch bend. My Launch Control simply feeds into my keyboard abstraction rack via dedicated binding, so it doesn’t matter if I use the modulation wheel on an attached keyboard or the first rotary control. Same with pitch bend.
It’s jst a bit fiddly for pitch bend, since the sliders / rotary controllers don’t center automatically, so I avoid that situation. I rarely use pitch bend as pitch bend, since I have both hands busy in most of my songs. Mostly, I use my pitch wheels as a Lesle switch for organs…
Cheers,
Torsten
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Very true. Having a more limited palette can stimulate creativity as well. I often wonder if life wasn’t cooler when I only had about three main sounds- Hammond, MiniMoog, Wurlitzer piano and later a Prophet- and really had to think about ways to mutate them and make them do cool things. Now I see on forums where people will ask stuff like, “What’s the best library for kids voices?” I’m going dude, go get four kids and make them sing, how hard is it! lol “What’s the best VST for a tambourine?” Man, you can’t buy a flippin’ tambourine and hit it??
Sorry for the rant- you kids! Get off my lawn!
(That’s all thinking more in terms of writing and recording- live when you’re doing covers obviously people want THE SOUND that they heard on the rekkid, I get that)
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