View Single Post
Old 12-20-2017, 10:13 PM   #1
Chris Heinen
Human being with feelings
 
Chris Heinen's Avatar
 
Join Date: Nov 2017
Location: USA
Posts: 74
Default MIDI Routing - best practices

I'm a noob to Reaper MIDI routing options but I've been reading a lot of the various forum posts about it and experimenting, and I'm slowly getting the hang of it... I had some questions for the "power users"...

I've been playing around with a MIDI instrument library called "Virtual Playing Orchestra" (VPO) in Reaper. It's a collection of sfz's and wav files that have been curated into a group of orchestral instruments with various articulations. The person that wrote the library has grouped the instruments such that for a given articulation (e.g. staccato) you can load it into an instance of an sfz player (I'm using sforzando). If you only want the sustain you only have to load the sustain articulation, if you also want pizzicato, you load a separate instance for that, etc.

I'm tweaking notes in the Notation view of the MIDI editor and assigning channels to individual notes so that they fire the corresponding articulations in the sforzando instances. I've even been able to set up some buttons and keyboard shortcuts to assign articulations more quickly.

Everything is working fine, but I had some noob questions about the "best practices" for how to route MIDI channels when working with these resources.

In the first scenario, track 1 is a simple MIDI track with a single MIDI item, and has MIDI routing to tracks 2, 3, 4, and 5. Track 2 contains an instance of sforzando with a VPO sustain patch, track 3 has a separate sforzando instance with a VPO staccato patch, track 4 has a VPO pizzicato patch and track 5 has a VPO accent patch. In the attached image, the MIDI routing from track 1 to the VSTi tracks is shown.

https://i.imgur.com/HBmirI4.png

Is this the "normal" way to set up a multi-VSTi configuration when you want separate MIDI channels for a given MIDI track/item? For some reason, to me, it seems like overkill to have 4 tracks just to get MIDI routing set up. Thoughts?

In the second scenario, track 1 is (again) a simple MIDI track, but this time instead of having 4 audio tracks, through experimentation with Reaper's "MIDI buss" settings, I was able to get all 4 audio VSTi's to run on track 2 "in parallel". I figured out how to assign each instance of sforzando to a specific MIDI buss, then set up track 1's send routing so it would route each of the 4 MIDI channels where they belonged. In the attached image I show the first instance of sforzando assigned to a MIDI buss and the channel routing to it from track 1.

https://i.imgur.com/GiE5LiM.png

I admit that the second scenario is kind of whacky since I'm now using up the MIDI busses just to get basic MIDI channel routing, but it is the only way I have yet to discover how to get MIDI channel assignments at the FX/VSTi level. Thoughts? Should I just abandon scenario two and stick with the first?

Thanks for any/all help you can provide...

CH
__________________
"If music be the food of love, play on." - William Shakespeare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sWOWHqw18U
Chris Heinen is offline   Reply With Quote