Only getting one voice to play at a time on Garritan Personal Orchestra

Hi,

I actually know quite a bit about audio production, but I learned about recording way back in the analog days. I’m relatively new to DAW-based recording and I’m VERY inexperienced with soft synths.

I’ve been trying to add some orchestral tracks with Garritan Personal Orchestra. I’ve got MIDI running from my keyboard (a Roland XP-50) thru my computer interface (a PreSonus Firepod) as a controller. I am able to open up the “ensemble” patches, which contain multiple instruments. So, the Aria player seems to be loading right. However, I am only able to play the patch that comes up in the first slot. When I use other soft synths, including the stripped down version of Garritan (i.e. the “Pocket Orchestra”) that came with Sonar X1 (which plays the samples through Dimension Pro, rather than the Aria player), I’m able to get all of the different instruments layered in together, and I can play them all from my keyboard.

Any ideas on what might be going on here?

Thanks,
Brad

BLU,

In the Aria GUI change the MIDI Channel to Omni for each instrument. It's the small number on the far right of each instrument strip. Works great here. This is with the Aria Player loaded in single and NOT in Multi Mode.

There are more complex ways to get the Aria Player working in very custom per MIDI channel ways and usually Randy 'RBowser' will sniff out any Garritan thread and lend his welcome expertise, but try the above for now and see if it doesn't work.

BLUtunes


Thanks guys! You rock!!!!

And, no, I don't know anything about changing the midi channels on my keyboard. I am really, really, REALLY a midi novice!

Sounds like you got it working - cool - and there's no need to change your MIDI channels on your keyboard. If you run into any more trouble do a search. There's a couple of threads that go into great detail if you need to set up the Aria Player to play per channel MIDI using the Multi Mode. I prefer the single mode set up with the Omni Channels then you can control everything from the Aria player. If you use the Multi Mode you can control everything from Sonar, but it takes some effort to set up.

HumbleNoise





...There are more complex ways to get the Aria Player working in very custom per MIDI channel ways and usually Randy 'RBowser' will sniff out any Garritan thread and lend his welcome expertise, but try the above for now and see if it doesn't work.

hehe, you're right, Larry, I usually sniff out Garritan related questions on the Forum.  Computer problems have been keeping me mostly off the internet though, so am only just now finding this thread.

Looks like things were cleared up here already - I want to add a few things:

--HunaMan - I found your #6 post on the other thread, and replied there:

http://forum.cakewalk.com...4&mpage=1#msgNum25

BLUTunes, I can see you got things happening the way you want.  You're using GPO in a non-standard way, and that's why Aria isn't defaulting the way you've been wanting.  GPO was developed by Gary Garritan so composers could have an affordable software orchestra on their computers.  For work like that, naturally each instrument of the orchestra needs to be individually controlled.  So Aria is pre-configured with each of the 16 instruments slots being assigned different MIDI channels, 1 through 16.

But, as Sidroe explained, there are ways to get Aria to behave like Dim Pro -you just need to manually set the instruments you want to hear simultaneously to the same MIDI channel.  You're going for what we call the "organ effect" since organs were early synths that let a keyboardist play layers of orchestral instruments at the same time.  The results don't sound at all natural that way, of course, but I don't think naturalism if what you're going for.

If you Do want the tracks to sound more like a group of musicians, after recording your performance, copy the track and paste it into new MIDI tracks - only this time, have the GPO instruments on separate MIDI channels, and have each of the new MIDI track copies set to correspond to those channels.  Do some editing on each track, focusing primarily on not having the notes begin at the same time as on the other tracks.  Easiest way to do that is to click Ctrl+F1 - that brings up the Sonar CAL menu.  Look for "Random Time"--Apply that to the track, and it shuffles the notes just slightly - If you do some editing like that on all the tracks, the results will sound more like an actual group of musicians, since it's literally impossible for musicians to begin notes at precisely the same time.  Of course, they don't often play in unison like this either, all playing the same notes.

BUT - I doubt that last paragraph is apropos to what you want to do BLUtunes, but I still wanted to explain how to make your results more natural in case that's what you'd like instead of the "organ" tone of playing a stack of instruments at the same time.

Carry on!
Randy B.