Transferring a branch of a topic that had been under the Deals forum.
 

sharke
Geist is one of my most used VST's...
 
But there are two other arrangement techniques Geist facilitates that I have yet to delve into - one is dragging patterns from Geist into a MIDI track in the host, the other is the "scenes" feature. I love the idea of dragging patterns into Sonar, but I'm not sure how ...

Since I like the idea of working in Sonar Platinum to do my arrangements, I want to access some bits from Geist without trying to use Geist as my arranging tool.
 
I experimented with it and so far have found the following to work.
 
1. drag from the selected pattern key onto a corresponding Geist MIDI track in Sonar at your desired spot in the timeline.
2. When playing Sonar at that point (at least what I'm experiencing so far), Geist just gets going as soon as you hit the space bar.
3. To turn off Geist, and hear it only at the point you dragged the MIDI clip to, select a different pattern key in Geist, presumably one that has no pattern on it.
4. Result is that Sonar does its thing, and when the timeline gets to the part where the Geist MIDI clip is waiting, as expected, Geist kicks in and plays exactly that pattern.
5. Seems like this would work fine for mixing and matching different things that I would want to grab from different patterns I come up with in Geist, and put them into one or more Geist MIDI tracks as desired.  Probably ultimately freeze the Geist instance once the stuff is essentially settled to save on unnecessary CPU, unless editing it further.
 
I'm a rookie at Geist, but that's what I've come up with so far.

I have only dabbled in this enough to be intimidated by it. Geist will fire based on MIDI notes by channel (pg 10 of the Geist manual), but as I went down that path to play around it became obvious that remembering SONAR triggers and Geist presets (all engines/patterns) could create a logistics nightmare. As I am fairly new myself, I have opted (at least at this point) to let Geist do its thing and work with saving presets by song name. A couple nice things with this has been learning the "Song" page in Geist, as well as being able to continue working in Geist in stand-alone mode (when desired).
 
Playing with the factory presets has been a great help, since some of them (several with fully developed songs) show well what Geist can do and also allow you to drill into the nuts and bolts to see how it was set up. The manual dishes out info fast and furious, and it is not until seeing things in action that they make the most sense.
 

Mettelus - if interested, take a shot at what I described above.

In my last experiment this afternoon I had one instance of Geist loaded in Sonar. I wasn't using a Simple Instrument Track, so I had separate MIDI and instrument (audio) tracks. I cloned the Geist MIDI track 4 times.

Then within Geist I either pulled up or created 4 different patterns on different pattern keys. I dragged the pattern key from each pattern to the different MIDI tracks in Sonar. After dragging the pattern to Sonar I ensured that particular engine thereafter was pointing to an empty pattern key. So, before kicking anything off, I ensured that each engine in Geist was presently set to a pattern key that was empty (no pattern).

Just as hoped, when hitting the space bar in Sonar, Geist fired each pattern only as assigned and when assigned in the Sonar timeline.

Each pattern had different kits, and on spots where there were overlays of two sections of MIDI (on separate MIDI tracks), they both played and made cool blends etc. The individual kit sounds hold and aren't confused. Everything per MIDI track is uniquely controllable.

I did a freeze as well and it all sounded great.

So I think this approach will help me tame the learning curve of Geist and let me use it under my control within Sonar Platinum.

For me, this has been cool progress.

I didn't mean to imply that your OP doesn't work (in fact, Geist's MIDI routing works like a charm). The concern I have is that firing via SONAR 1) requires the same pads to be loaded (I am shifting engines willy nilly lately) and 2) if I want to edit that MIDI data I need to keep track of what MIDI channel I need, and what note is which pad/pattern, etc. As soon as I started using multiple engines it became clear that editing that MIDI data (in SONAR) could turn into a nightmare quickly, whereas doing it within Geist itself gives a better visual for editing (i.e. engine 1 pad 1/pattern 1 is intuitive, versus C-2 Ch10/C-1 Ch 1 respectively). For dragging/dropping there are no issues, but for editing it becomes problematic and doesn't due justice to what the engine is truly capable of (it is essentially a self-contained DAW).
 
Sorry for the confusion there. What you posted above does indeed work.

lawajava, there is actually no need to select an empty pattern key when you are dragging patterns to a MIDI track. All you have to remember is that if your aim is to trigger Geist's pads from a MIDI track in Sonar, you have to turn the pattern power button off for that engine. Under each engine number you have three buttons - mute, solo and pattern power. Turning pattern power off on an engine means that Geist will no longer play the selected patterns for that engine. You are then free to trigger that engine's pads via MIDI from Sonar. 

For what it's worth, I think a good workflow would be to arrange as much as you can with Geist's patterns and song arranger, and then when you've got the basic arrangement of the song down, turn off song mode and pattern power and drag the patterns into Sonar MIDI tracks to match the arrangement you've constructed in Geist. 
 
The advantage of this is that once those patterns are transferred to a Sonar MIDI track, you can edit them in finer detail and you are not limited to the 24 patterns per engine that Geist gives you. So you can add little variations and fills and embellishments and whatnot without having to worry about using up another pattern slot. I guess when you're limited to 24 patterns it makes you approach things in a certain way, one which I'm sure those who cut their chops on drum machines are used to. But the way I see it, why limit yourself? This mirrors the way I'm used to working in Sonar anyway. Sometimes I will write a MIDI bass part and copy and paste the clips across the whole track just to get the basic structure down, then later I'll go over the whole track clip by clip and add minor variations to "humanize" it. 
 
The fact that we are even having this conversation is part of the beauty of Geist - it's workflows are many and varied. 

There is one feature of SONAR's internal step sequencer I have not yet found in Geist and not sure if it even exists. In SONAR's SS, the random feature (Step Play Probability) of a note firing/not firing is nice in that it allows for grace notes for a more humanized feel, but when working with Geist I do not see an obvious feature to do this. Does such exist?
 
IIRC, in SONAR's SS, if a pattern is moved to a MIDI track with this feature enabled, the track itself maintained the random on/off effect for selected notes (but not sure if this means there is a CC parameter to control this, if that MIDI clip is still linked to the SS, or if the "random" is printed to the track as a permanent note/non-note). This particular mechanic confuses me as well.
 
Edit: I just tested the above, and the Step Play Probability is linked to the internal SS and requires it to be active. If a SS is bounced to clip, the notes are generated based on the settings of the SS, but they then become static (as do other functions controlled by the SS).
 
Edit2: I asked this question on the Geist forum and the response was what I expected. The only way to achieve grace notes is with the random firing of pad layers. If some are loaded with silent wavs, the random pad layer would trigger grace notes, but this has the caveat of 1) not allowing that pad to be layered and 2) a pad would be required for only grace notes (otherwise notes you want to always hit could be silent at the same rate). Overall this is simply a nicety more for live performance, since a recorded track is "set in stone" anyway.