I am not sure i understand the difference between Rackspaces and Variations when it comes to changing patches on my plugins. Do you create muplte rackspaces for each patch or do you create 1 Rackspace and use Variations for each different patch?
Does creating 10 rackspaces for 10 different patches eat up memory and CPU power?
Here is a blog article and a couple of useful posts indexed that are useful to make things clearer: [blog] About rackspaces and variations
1 Like
Hmm, I just answered this on the YouTube channel where you asked it as well.
Wow you folks are fast! LOL
3 Likes
The best community around!!
4 Likes
I am so Old school and I am trying to catch up! There was a time in a galaxy far far away when I was on the cutting edge of VST tech… using 4 Digidesgn Samplecell cards each with a whopping 64meg of RAM on my Mac IIFX…LOL
4 Likes
True!
The blog article linked above covers it, but the short answer is that it really depends on the plugins you use and how many parameters change between variations.
For any parameter that you want to change between variations, you’ll need a widget attached to that parameter. If you’re using a B3 vst and all you’re moving is drawbar positions, then you can probably do that well with variations.
But if you’re using any of the major B3 VSTs and you’re choosing between different presets in those, there are probably a lot more parameters than just the drawbars changing. e.g., the vib/chorus mode may be different, there may be embedded effects like distortion and reverb that are different between the patches, the Leslie cabinet type and rotor speeds may be different, the capacitor models may be different (which can pretty dramatically change the sound). Unless you map more or less every parameter to widgets, changing variations isn’t going to give you the same results as changing presets in the VST itself.
For model based VSTs (which is the vast majority of what I use these days) I’ll tend to use different Rackspaces for different sounds, and my variations in those rackspaces will just be sound tweaks (e.g., chorus on/off, drawbar positions, mixer blends). If I’m using a VST that’s very RAM heavy (which tends to be load time heavy) I’ll try to use variations when I can.
On my system I’m never anywhere close to using up my RAM, so I tend to use different rackspaces more than different variations. Or sometimes a bit of a hybrid approach, where I’ll have four instances of Pianoteq in one Rackspace, and my variations will be used to turn on/off and or mix between them.
No right or wrong answer.
4 Likes
If you use variations of the same rackspace, this saves ram as compared to duplicating the same instrument in different rackspaces.
This is more relevant for a ram intensive sample-based instruments. For a virtual synth or modeled instrument, it may not make much of a different in terms of ram usage.
I am currently looking into putting my ram intensive instruments (which are used more than once) in the Global Rackpsace so they are only loaded once in ram. But I have not gotten around to it yet.
Jeff
1 Like
hello - I’m a newbie to Gig Performer and am loving using it so far (and I generally have hated anything to do with programming synths!) Just a quick question on any best practice advice for how I should create my rackspaces to be most efficient for GP/my laptop.
I’m using a variety of plugins (Keyscape, Arturia, IK hammond) to create variations and splits.
As an example, so far I’ve been doing the following:
(Rackspace 1) Keyscape Electric Piano
- Variation 1
- Variation 2
- Variation 3
(Rackspace 2) Electric Piano + (Kontakt) Strings split
- Variation 1
- Variation 2
- Variation 3
Is this an optimal approach? I guess the question I have is it feels like I’m duplicating resources if Electric piano variations 1, 2 and 3 are the same across Rackspaces 1 and 2.
Any advice or suggestions much appreciated! Ranj
Hi @ranjith ,
welcome to the Family 
Yes this approach is perfect
This way you can use MIDI patch persist.
Don’t worry about resource usage, as when you use the same plugin across rackspaces only instances of that plugin are loaded.
But there is a point you should take care of:
When you use sample based plugins which are not dealing well with loaded samples
- for example the new Rhodes V8 plugin needs 2 GB memory per instance.
In Kontakt and Keyscape this is optimized - streaming from disk and in case of Kontakt purge sample pool.
And good programmed plugins like Kontakt do not consume CPU when not used.
When you use setlist mode you can reuse rackspaces.
5 Likes
thanks for your help @pianopaul, that’s really helpful… I will look into MIDI patch persist - I have more docs to read!
Looks good to me.
If you are going to change the piano you use, you will have to decide whether to create a new rackspace or try to change the patch in keyscape/Kontakt using widgets and a different rackspace variation…
I just do the former. I “think” this is the more standard sanctioned approach. But it means you’re loading a bit more in ram in your Gig file for each new rackspace (but as Paul points out, at least in Kontakt you could purge the sample pool).
With the other approach, which I don’t use, it may take time to load the new piano when you change the variation. And I think this could cause an issue?
Oh one more thing, Paul (and most other people on this board) are better at this and know more than me. So, follow what they say over me.
Jeff