Newbie with a number of questions

[theshinenz]

Hi Guys,

Iv been doing some reading alot of reading about cantabile and haved watched some youtube tutorial videos, but am still finding it very difficult. Ive been playing in covers bands for a number of years and only recently thought of moving some of my setup to software due to sound scope and flexibility. In the past I have run mainstage 2 which was really good although this time round i didnt want a laptop on stage so opted for an i7 tablet PC I am running the latest performer version of cantabile.

Along with flexibility comes complexity, so far from what Ive read the best way is to run all vst's in one session then send them to a master Rack.

I did this, then above that I have a number of racks, one with organs in it, eg VB3, linplug etc, then a another with kontakt in it, then another with a number of synths in it etc etc. At the moment Im running from my Roland Fa-06 on midi channel 9, I set the channel on each rack to 9 and bypass everything except the vst i am wanting to use.

I am confused by the sub-sessions and setlists and am not sure which to use. can someone explain the easiest way to get up cantabile. I am not worried about songs in any particular order as send all my program changes from my bottom tier fa-08 which changes patches on the fa-06 which forwards the message to cantabile to change to say program number 47, the only way ive kind of got it working so far is to use the midi assignment list and midi learn which will change between sub sessions but Im almost at a point of giving up as everytime i get something working i encounter another issue.

I also have a problem where my first plugin VB3 sounds loud and the kontakt, absynth, and other synths are very faint, Ive even turned the gains all the way up, I have the midi flow through icon enabled.

Other problems include in VB3 everytime i save a patch is changed the sound in my other subsession aswell and cannot get two different settings working with the same plugin.

I am aware as a new user 9 times out of 10 it will be a user issue, thats why i asked the question as at this point I think some guidance on the best way to start a session and build a list of songs i can switch via program change would be very helpful. Also how many plugins have people got in one session without issues, I think my session has about 20 in it and am not sure how many is too many. Even if someone could post screenshots of their setup that would be awesome.

Thanks in advance.

Scott

[humphrey]

Hi Scott,

as a short answer: there is nothing sub sessions can do what sessions don`t. So the easiest way to get a starting point is:

1) Create a session for a song
2) Store it
3) Create a new session for a different song (of course you can use an existing one as starting point, modify it and store it under a different name)
4) After sessions are implemented create a setlist with the stored sessions inside

Now you should be able to call up different songs by clicking them in the setlist. Of course you can assign an external MIDI-controller (f.e. a keyboard) to this list and call the sessions from your keyboard.

The only disadvantage is the load time when calling up a new session (can be some seconds but strongly depends on the setup). There are several strategies to decrease load times:
- Use SSDs
- Use less sample based plugins (specially kontakt is a real RAM eater and makes load times long)
- Use the same layout for all sounds: cantabile remembers if a plugin was loaded. If the new setup uses it again (even if it is disabled) cantabile refuses to release the plugin.

The last strategy is to use subsessions:
+ as plugins are not loaded from sub session to sub session load time decreases
- specially for samplers you have to load all of the sounds into the instrument you need for a whole show. This again leads to RAM problems (32 Bit applications can only allocate 2 GBytes of RAM) which leads to using the 64Bit versions of host and plugin.
- sub sessions only store a subset of parameters which leads to very complicated scenarios when using MIDI-routings and trigger events.

To my mind you should get familiar with sessions as first step. If you want to dig deeper into subsessions you should have a closer look on the "sub session behaviour" folders for racks and plugins - here you will be able to define, which parameters are stored for a sub session. Enabling "Entire Bank" here will most probably solve the problem of VB3 not storing sound btw.

One last sentence to "always find a new problem": I think this is typical for live hosts. Cantabile is a machine with 1000s of possibilities (much more than any workstation can offer) but you pay it with time you have to invest to get things managed the way you want them. Sometimes less might be more...

Hope this can help you as a starting point.

Regrads, humphrey

[theshinenz]

Thanks Humprey, Ive now got a session setup and am using sub-sessions to switch between sounds. Slowly getting to grips with it. One issue Im still having is being able to get the subsessions to switch by program numbers, unless i put a big list of them in the midi assignments list, Id prefer if I could switch them just with their relevant numbers. My FA-08 sends an 85.0.1 for program 1 and 85.0.2 for program 2 etc etc, I tried filtered the banks but it just stopped everything working. I also tried setting the bank at 85 and program number etc but that didnt work either.

[humphrey]

Hi,

maybe you could have a look here:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 1#p5841911
As far as I remember I described how to map pc-instructions to setlists.

Regards, humphrey

[Midiman1962]

hi
i'm just starting the same process as you "theshinenz"
any chance you could post a screenshot of what your session looks like to help me along.
many thanks

[humphrey]

No, sorry, as I don't have an active setup here (more active on homerecording atm).

But let me ask: what exactly is the problem in your case?

Regards, humphrey