After much experimenting, here is my “go-to” rackspace for AWAKEN - A Tribute to the Music of Yes.
As many of you know, Yes music requires an extensive palette of sounds for each song. So I begin each tune with a front panel with 6 channels tied to a 16 channel Audio Mixer in the rear.
The upper Left button is tied to the Solo of each channel in the mixer.
The upper Right button is open, and I typically map it to the “Bypass” of whatever plugin the channel is linked to.
The Gain knob on top is tied to the Gain on the rear panel of its corresponding channel.
This I use should I need to map an expression pedal from any controller.
The VU Meters and Slider are mapped to Volume of corresponding channel in the Audio Mixer.
The bottom 2 buttons and knobs are left open should they be needed to map to anything specific in the plugin assigned to that channel.
I keep them there ready to go because many times I will want to map one of my expression pedals to that instead of the plugin directly. If I use it, great. If not, it just sits at ZERO.
So, I set the volume of the mixing channel (the center slider) to the MAX volume I would want for a particular sound, then use the Expression Pedal / Gain block underneath that.
I had arrived at a similar solution. I tied sliders to the mixer volume for each channel pair. I find it very useful for fine tuning the volume of individual VSTs in live performance when needed. Because the songs we play are so different, I decided to have one rackspace for each song. What I find is that changes to the sliders don’t “stick”, whether saving the gig or changing songs/rackspaces. When I return to that song, I’m back to the volumes originally set in the mixer. I can see that being a good thing when a rackspace is shared with multiple songs. It becomes a little cumbersome for me to switch to edit the rackspace, adjust the mixer, go back to the song to test, go back to the mixer to adjust again, back to the song, on and on. Is this a problem for you and, if so, have you found a solution that makes life easier?
Changes within a rackspace/variation are kept if you play in rackspace mode, but as soon as you play in setlist mode, the needed rackspace variation will always be called up in that state, as it was saved in rackspace mode.
However, you should search for a little disk symbol, which lets you also save snapshots of variations for each song part.
Thank you for this!
I’m slowly transitioning from another host to GP and I’m frequently running into the “old dog, new tricks” syndrome.
So….can I incorporate this rack into my existing songs?
If so, how?
Thanks again man and I will be hitting an Awaken show this year for sure.
For what its worth, I just use the widgets panel without the rackspace plugins.
So, I set up the rackspace itself how I want, depending upon plugins, etc. (I rarely use a gain plugins).
Then I just import this panel. So, I go to Edit Widgets and the I select this panel and import it (and I usually delete the default panel).
Not, sure if this is “as intended”, but it is great for me. If I am not using all the slider icons, I could delete some, but I rarely do.
Actually, it is good to keep them. I often add new plugins with sounds to existing rackspace to conserve ram. (If there is a plugin (or more than one) that I want to use, but I need to add another plugin, I can add the new one to the existing rackspace and then bypass in the existing rackspace. This allows me to avoid expending additional ram on duplicated plugins/sounds on different rackspaces.)
This panel has plenty of buttons that can be used to bypass unused plugins in particular variations.
Great!
Jeff
PS: I still think it would be amazing if the the developers allowed you to “freeze” a plugin and place the duplicate in another rackspace (so no (or very little) new memory is used). That way, you would not have worry about bypassing unused plugins and you can put the “frozen” plugin in whatever rackspace you want.