I’ve spent the past week re-creating or sampling the sounds for 31 songs that I used my Korg to play in my primary band into a single gig file. After doing a lot of research and watching a ton of videos I incorporated some great ideas into the global and local rack space templates from the start.
After seeing last Thursday’s video with Alex, I realized that I needed some additional features on the global side for a useful rig. I started with his example and customized it - adding a section to control the page and song forwards on my iPad running for score, and to incorporate a pink noise generator for sound check. I also wired in a chorus, Reverb and Delay option into the global wiring. The templates I created for different instrument counts include faders that control how much is fed into the global plugins, with most patches off.
I created the gig file and sounds on my M1 laptop running monterey. And then copied that, exported presets and the Kontakt Sample instruments over to the performance rig, which is a rack-mounted mac Mini M2 Pro that just came last week. Unfortunately, it has Ventura which presented some issues and differences in how things worked, but I managed to overcome them all and now it seems really solid and ready for Saturday’s show. I can finally get back to learning/practicing instead of trying to troubleshoot my hardware problems on the Korg.
I’m using the rig manager feature to define standard fader/knob/actions and map the Arturia Keylab controls in both Analog Lab and User mode, since the CC values are vastly different between them. I used a label maker to customize one of the template overlays that came with the Keylab to identify the main global buttons I’ve mapped.
I’m using ForScore to send program change values - which are associated in GP with the first part of each song defined in the set list (since that seems to be the only place where I can set the bank and MSB/LSB values)
I still have to create a different rig for another 29 songs used in a 2nd band. My next show with them is in April, so I’ve got a little time to work on that. The initial goal is to replace everything my Korg was doing for both bands.
After that there’s all kinds of possibilities to explore like creating custom splits for the Nord, or using its external feature to have 88 keys available for some songs. Can’t wait to get to that point. Thanks for all of the resources and videos - it was all instrumental in coming up to speed and getting here in less than a month with no prior vst experience!
For information, here are the problems I encountered with ventura
- I started out creating a midi device from my iPad using the midi/audio wifi feature and configured GP to receive and relay PC messages to itself, and forward others to my attached Nord. That would intermittently disconnect with the ipad dropping out. I configured some new buttons on the global rack to transmit some custom CC messages to the ipad to control page/song advancement in ForScore, and hooked those up to 4 buttons on the controller. That worked great on the laptop. When I opened the gig on the mac mini - it refused to send the midi out to the ipad network. The incoming PC messages from the iPad worked fine.
The solution to this was to hook my blutooth widi device to the midi in/out on my keylargo mixer and re-configure the mac mini to use that as the ‘ipad’ network. And after 8 hours it’s still connected - and worked flawlessly while I partially played through 3 set lists.
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Kontakt seems to have a bug in Ventura. I tried to adjust the volume to bring it up for some sampled patches and the vintage organ plugin, and it was unable to restore that value. I tried going into kontakt to save it and it zeroed out some samples and then showed an error that samples were missing. The solution was to make the edits on the laptop, copy the nki file over and reload into gig performer on the mac mini. They just barely started supporting ventura, so hopefully that will be fixed soon.
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The momentary pedal I use to select the next patch was jumping by 3 songs with each press when plugged into the Arturia. The fix was to override the behavior on that input and modify the range to always begin and end with 64.
