I use GP with my covers band, but until now just to trigger additional wav backing tracks and click through the SAFP. It’s a very simple set up where each song has its own rackspace and there’s one rackspace per GP song.
This has worked perfectly but now I’d like to bring my guitar setup into GP as well, and I’m faced with the issue of how best to arrange this. It seems I have the choice of putting the amp and effects chain individually into each rackspace, of putting it into the global rackspace, or a combination of the two. Are there any disadvantages of putting some or all of the chain in the global rackspace?
One issue I’m thinking about is if I wanted to use markers to trigger actions at given points in the audio file players to (for example) switch effects on or off at certain parts of the song to save me some tap dancing on my midi foot controller. Would this still be possible if the block were in the global rather than the local rackspace? Or am I looking at this in the wrong way and should I instead be concentrating on variations within the rackspaces to change my guitar sounds?
Sorry if this is basic stuff but I just wanted some opinions from anyone who uses GP like this. I’d be grateful for any suggestions.
I am a keyboard player primarily that also plays guitar on 3-6 songs per show. We do not currently use any kinds of tracks. My approach has always been to setup guitar rigs in individual rackspaces. I have a single guitar ‘template’ rackspace I duplicate for these. Here are some of the benefits I see to the ‘per rackspace’ approach.
It is easy to pick and choose which guitar amp/fx plugins I want to use for each individual song and I have been known to use more than one per rackspace
Whatever customization/patching you’ve done in a processor gets saved with the rackspace
Simply muting/unmuting given plugins via variations of a rackspace becomes and easy process. Switching variations using actions in your tracks/sequences should be fairly straightforward
I’m interested to see what real guitar players who use GP for everything would suggest VS what my experience and opinions are. I’m not saying my approach is the best, but so far it has worked well for me personally.
Thanks for your prompt reply. So for something like amp sim and effects there would be no adverse effects on laptop performance by having lots of duplicate guitar setups, each in their own rackspaces?
There will be an impact on RAM, but usually guitar plugins aren’t too bad. If it becomes an issue, that’s what ‘predictive loading’ is for.
Only the active rackspace and the global rackspace will consume cpu. You will get some cpu spikes as you change rackspaces, as GP will smoothly transition between the two (you can set things up for delay and reverb tails to not be cut off).
If you want to keep duplication down, consider running your guitar rig in a second instance, optionally controlling/automating changes from your main instance via either OSC or midi through GPRelayer blocks.
It’s redistributing complexity rather than reducing it, but if you ever want to add another element to your setup, the number of necessary variations wont explode exponentially as they can if everything is in a single instance.