East/West Play routing multiple instruments in one instance to multiple instrument tracks

Hi all,
I'm pretty new to Midi orchestration and I have some of the East/West Libraries.  This might be pretty basic..
 
I've made some healthy compositions using many instrument tracks with a separate instance of play loaded for each one.  After reading the documentation they recommend that I route multiple instruments in one instance to multiple tracks in order to save Computer usage.
 
Now I'm working on some pretty in depth projects and would like to learn best practice for setting synths up.  Is it possible to route the instruments to separate instrument tracks?  I can't seem to figure it out.
 
I've tried creating new tracks and setting the output options.  I've also tried just about every configuration I can think of in the Synth Properties page that pops up when I click to add a new Synth.
 
I would really appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction as there is a lot of new terms and things I have to learn.
 
Thanks!!!
 

I use separate instances of Play for each instrument, but each instance has different mic routings to different tracks. For instance if you want to add some violins, choose Insert-Soft Synth-VST2-Play. When the option box comes up I choose All Outputs and turn off Midi Out. Now Play will load and you will have a lot of audio tracks. I delete all but the top 3 of them( there are only 3 mic positions so I only need 3 audio tracks). Now go into the Play interface and use the browser to find and load the instrument. Once it's loaded go to the Player interface and at the bottom of the Mic section you'll see Mute buttons and 3 unlabeled buttons. Click on the buttons to call up the audio tracks you want to assign each mic to. I usually go in order, the first mic to the first output, the second to the second, etc. Now when you record each mic will go to a separate audio track. I've loaded up 20 instances of Play before without a problem so I find it easier to use each instance for the separate instruments. Let me know if you need more info, good luck!
 
Bill

mikebeam
Hi all,
I'm pretty new to Midi orchestration and I have some of the East/West Libraries.  This might be pretty basic..
 
I've made some healthy compositions using many instrument tracks with a separate instance of play loaded for each one.  After reading the documentation they recommend that I route multiple instruments in one instance to multiple tracks in order to save Computer usage.
 
Now I'm working on some pretty in depth projects and would like to learn best practice for setting synths up.  Is it possible to route the instruments to separate instrument tracks?  I can't seem to figure it out.
 
I've tried creating new tracks and setting the output options.  I've also tried just about every configuration I can think of in the Synth Properties page that pops up when I click to add a new Synth.
 
I would really appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction as there is a lot of new terms and things I have to learn.
 
Thanks!!!
 

Not sure if this is what you mean. What I do sometimes is after I load in the Play synth and want to have several instruments feed into it I will insert several midi tracks select the Play output then select separate midi channel outputs for the tracks.  Then load the instrument into Play and select the midi channel in Play that the instrument track will use.  Do that for each midi track/instrument selecting separate midi channel outputs and loading a corresponding instrument with the desired midi channel.  Potentially up to 16 instruments can be loaded into each instance of Play.

@Bapu:  I'd be interested in hearing about how to do it in Kontakt too.
 
@Cookie:  I tried that but it's not doing what I want it to.  I was hoping to have two instrument tracks.  Function in the same way that multiple loads would.  Does that make sense?
 
@golophei:  I have an i5 processor with a WD Black mechanical hard drive.  8gb of RAM.  I bought Hollywood Strings/Brass/Woodwinds Silver.  I also have the Dark Side Library and Symphonic Choir.  I haven't noticed a problem up to about 10 instances, but the project I'm working on has multiple movements and I wanted to have a few different articulations ready to go...  
 
- Perhaps I should just load separate instances for each instrument track...  It just seemed like EWQL was suggesting that wasn't best practice and I wanted to get used to do things the "right" way...
 
Your thoughts?

@Kylotan - I think that worked.  It would be cool if I could then combine the tracks into an instrument track - it seems that I could do it if there were only one midi and one audio going to the Synth, but I can't have multiple instrument tracks?
 
I was thinking about setting it up similarly - one instance for either all the different variations of envelopes/articulations I need for each instrument or one instance for a section.  Do you just have double the tracks on your screen? Two for each instrument - midi and audio?  Seems kind of cumbersome - no?  
 
I might just stick with having multiple instances, but it would be really cool to understand the ins and outs of this just in case I ever need it.
 
What do you think?
 

Actually - I still don't think it's working quite right.
 
The track on the piano roll is playing on all the instruments.  I've even set the midi channels - although that's not really doing anything.
 
On top of that, when I changed out an instrument and rewired the outputs just as I did when I first set up the two tracks, it didn't work.  

Instrument tracks are a bit of a dumbed-down system in Sonar and aren't really suitable for complex work. It's a bit annoying needing 2 tracks for every synth and sampler instrument in Sonar but it is something I get used to.
 

mikebeam
Actually - I still don't think it's working quite right.
 
The track on the piano roll is playing on all the instruments.  I've even set the midi channels - although that's not really doing anything.

Sounds like you haven't set the MIDI channels inside Play, or they are set to Omni.
 

On top of that, when I changed out an instrument and rewired the outputs just as I did when I first set up the two tracks, it didn't work. 

Can't help you without more information. If you had something working once, did it again, and it doesn't work the second time, it suggests you did something differently.
 
Here's the checklist:
Load instrument 1 into Play
Load instrument 2 into Play, selecting 'Add' not 'Replace'
Click instrument 1 at top left, ensure it says 'Ch. 1' and '1 -2' under it.
Click instrument 2 at top left, ensure it says 'Ch. 2' and '3 - 4' under it.
Return to Sonar, insert 2 MIDI tracks and 2 Audio tracks.
Select MIDI track 1, set the Output to Play_VST 1 and set the Channel to 1. (Bank and Patch can be ignored.)
Select MIDI track 2, set the Output to Play_VST 1 and set the Channel to 2. (Bank and Patch can be ignored.)
Select Audio track 1, set the Input to Play_VST 1 1-2/2 Stereo.
Select Audio track 2, set the Input to Play_VST 1 3-4/4 Stereo.
 
Now, when I click on each of those MIDI channels, I can play my keyboard (assuming the input is set up correctly) and it'll play just that instrument through my single instance of Play.

Somewhere on this site is a lengthy post of mine where I went into great detail explaining how to set this up with EWQLSO Platinum.
 
This setup also made use of drum maps as separate Midi tracks for your articulations.
 
I'm at work at the moment (and shouldn't really be posting) but if I get chance I'll do a search tonight - or maybe try searching yourself. I think it's in the techniques forum and was originally posted about 3 years ago

Found it:
 
Ok, here goes, I’ll describe it step by step which hopefully you can follow. 

1.       Insert an instance of Play. You want MIDI Source activated, along with First Synth Audio Output 
2.       From the Player view, click Settings. Under “Other” you need to make sure that “Midi Channel Assignment” is set to “Automatic Increment” 
  
3.       From the Play gui, make sure you’re in Browser (not Player) and load an instrument. Pick one that contains a Master Keyswitch file. For this exercise I used 11Violins (11V KS) 
  
4.       Switch back to Player and make a note of how many articulations are listen in the central section.  11 Violins has 29 Articulations, but the bottom one in the list – Release Trails – cannot be mapped as an artic as isn’t mapped to a note number. So  the number of artics we’ll be mapping is 28 
  
5.       Now, go back to Sonar. Ignore the audio track for now. First thing to do is to make a clone of the Midi track. 
  
6.       It’s also probably a good idea at this stage to rename the instance of Play in the Synth rack. Just call it strings for now.
  
7.       Name one of these to something like \\\\ EW 11v KS \\\\ and name the other one Strings – 11 violins. It doesn’t really matter what you call them, as long as you can distinguish between the 2 types (which will eventually end  up as being 1 for Keyswitches and one for Midi notes & CC’s) 
  
  
8.       From your designated KS track, click on the Output field and select Drum Map manager 
9.       At the top of the page, select New 
  
10.   Under “notes” in the central section, hit New 28 times. The 28 is the number of artics we’re going to map as outlined above.  
11.   Now, when you’ve done that, scroll back up to the top of the list which should be note 0(C0). It doesn’t really matter if it says anything different, but it should be note 0. 
  
12.   Now here’s a potentially tricky bit. We need to remap both the In Note & the Out Note fields. And to make matters worse, Sonar & EW mappings are different by 2 octaves. What Sonar say is C2 (Note 24) EW says is C0 (Note 24) so you have to work out what note ranges in Sonar need to be mapped. I actually prepared a very simple spreadsheet in Excel which does this for me – all I have to do is read off the note as defined by EW and look at the relevant entry under Sonar. The last articulation in the EW Player reads “D#2 – Qleg Sord”. My spreadsheet tells me that D#2 in EW is note 51 in Sonar. 
13.   Double click the In Note and type in 51. The note designation will turn to Eb4. Do the same for the Out Note field. 
  
14.   Now move down to the next pair of In & Out note fields and type 50. Repeat this until you get to the end of the list. You should arrive at note #24 (C2 Sonar – C0 EW)  ** See post #10 below
  
15.   Go back to the top of the list. Under Name, double click and enter a new description. Again, this should be something that will make sense once you’re viewing it in the PRV. I used “11V Ks – Qleg Sord”. Repeat this for all the artics. 
  
16.   Now we need to adjust the “Channel” Parameter. Hold down Ctrl + Shift and select the top entry. Scroll down to the bottom, keep ctrl + shift held and select the bottom entry. The entire list should now be selected.  
  
17.   Keeping ctrl + shift held, select the channel from the drop down box which corresponds to the Channel number in the Play gui (top left, underneath Midi Port) 
  
18.   Now do a ctrl + shift + select of all (28) entries under “Out Port”. Select the instance of the Play vsti you’re working with (Strings) 
19.   Now click ok and you’re finished with the drum map. 
  
20.   Back in Sonar land, on your Ks Midi track, click the Output field again and point the output to the drum map you just created. This will normally be the last one in the list 
  
21.   Now switch to your cloned Midi track. Under the Channel field, select the Midi Channel we’ve just set on the Drum map. 
22.   Select both Midi tracks and hit Alt + 3 to go into the prv. You’ll need to drag down the top part of the screen to view the drum map. Make sure that under “view” you’ve got “Show/Hide Track Pane” selected 
  
23.   Now, hopefully, if you click any of the notes/artics in the Drum Map, you’ll see he corresponding articulation being selected on the blue keys in Play 
  
24.   Clicking on the “regular” keys in the “normal” prv should now provide you with sound 
  
All of this sounds extremely convoluted, but it’s much quicker to do in practice than it is to describe it. 
Now, you won’t be content with just 11 Violins as you only source of strings, so you need to add more instruments. 

1.       Back in the Play Browser, select another instrument and loads it’s Master Keyswitch file. 
2.       Click “Add” to add it to Play 
  
3.       The Midi channel should automatically increment 
  
4.       Now it’s a question of going back to step 4 above, making a note of the number of articulations. 
  
5.       Clone both of your existing Midi channels, change their header description in the same way as our first one. You might also want at this stage to consider putting similar tracks into Folders – one for your keyswitches and one for your Midi notes. 
  
6.       Follow the above steps again but this time you every time you have to enter or change a Midi channel, use the newly incremented number indicated in the Play gui 
  
7.       Now you can go back to the prv and under tracks > Pick tracks – select all 4 Mid tracks you’ve generated. 
  
8.       Remember to select, from the Track Pane, in Pairs – in order to work on a single instrument – 1 for the Keyswitches and one for the Notes/Controllers 
You can repeat all of the above for as many instruments as you want to load into 1 instance of Play, subject to a maximum of 16 (The Midi Channel limit) 
Now, it’s probably a good idea as you go along to also start cloning your audio tracks for each instrument you add. Yep, that now makes 3 tracks for each instrument. Cumbersome I know, but judicious use of the Track Manager can really help here. You certainly don’t want to see any of the Midi tracks in console view, so hide them there, and there’s no real benefit for being able to see the Keyswitch tracks in Track view, so hide them there. 
On your audio tracks, increment the Input parameter for each instrument you add. This makes auditioning the different instruments really easy. Name them and put them in folders. 
Once you’ve repeated this for all the strings (Section & solo), Brass & Woods you’ll probably end up with a fair number of tracks. 
Percussion is slightly different in that no Keyswitches are provided, instead, each instrument is laid out chromatically on the keyboard 
I’ve set up different folders, one for “Metals”, one for “Woods” etc. All you need to do here is increment each Midi channel as you load them. Currently I have 2 instances of play set up for percussion, but I’ve not finished with this yet, so a 3^rd will be added in due course. 
The Midi limit of 16 channels can be a bit of a problem here, as Metals, Drums & CymBong all contain over 16 instruments, so if you want to load all of them, they’ll need to be split across 2 (or more) Play instances. 
  
I hope this helps, I really do. At least you only have to do this once! Save it as a template. You can of course set it up so that initially, your synths are disconnected to speed up loading times, also, during composition, you can easily unload individual artics from the Play gui, thus releasing them from memory. 

This setup is currently eating up 7GB of RAM. 
 

@Kylotan - That worked!  I was screwing up the input and channel dropdowns - assigning the input to be the midi channel I wanted.  That checklist made it really clear - I appreciate it!
 
@Bristol - I think this is something more than I needed, but I'll definitely get into this as I think it's a great technique I'll want to learn.
 
Solved!
 

No problem.
 
It's a bit of a mind blower reading through it, but once you get into the swing of it, it's actually fairly simple but extremely tedious!!
 
This is what winters are for.

I set up multiple piano roll views with the artics (drum maps) above the actual notes.
 
This makes it much easier (for me) because It's always 100% obvious what I'm dealing with - a note or a keyswitch.
 
Without the drum mapping it's VERY hit or miss and there's no visual feedback regarding the type of articulation you've set to trigger.