Setting up a live electro set in GP4

General discussion about Gig Performer
1

Hey folks,

Finally upgraded to GP4. I’m trying to rig a bunch of different stuff up for a live electronica project. A couple of questions relating to that:

Is there a way to make GP completely dump a rackspace? Even with the limited rackspace mode set to minimum (3, only loads the one before and the one after the current rackspace) it’s still maintaining the connection to one of the plugins in an unloaded rackspace. Clearly that’s clever behaviour that GP is doing in terms of loading efficiency etc, but is there a way to make it not?

Is there some way I’m missing to pass midi from the global to the local rackspaces?

Is there a way to assign a control in GP to pop up a plugin’s interface?

Ok/. Says in the instructions to give full context, so here we go: What I’m trying to do is set up a live electronica rig using a maschine mikro, an flstudio fire and endlesss studio. I have endlesss in the global rackspace for looping and mashing of sounds controlled via midi by a novation launch kontrol, but I want to run chunks of the set out of maschine and Flstudio. I thought i would just set up individual rackspaces with tracks built to work with the respective software/hardware and load through them in GP, but it turns out that that the dedicated hardware for each behaves in a slightly odd way. Because the other rackspaces are still loaded in the background, the hardware focus doesn’t switch to the current rackspace when you load it.

With maschine, there is a button on the software interface that will tell the hardware to connect to that instance, so it’s fixable, but thus why i would like to be able to pop up the plugin interface with single button press.

With FL, once one instance has been loaded the fire seems to lock itself to it, and the only way to change that is to go into the midi settings in the program and disconnect the hardware, then go to the new instance and reconnect. Obviously that wouldn’t be practical in a live scenario. This is why I want to know if there’s a way to force the program to completely unload a rackspace.

Given that that may not be achievable, I realised that I could load FL in the global rackspace (so that it’s relationship to the hardware remains fixed) and then just pipe midi to instances of maschine . The main draw of using fl and fire is for the excellent hands on sequencing potential. If I just use it as a midi sequencer in the global space and then use maschine in the rackspaces to load sound sets, that would work great. Only problem is, I can’t work out how to pass midi to between global and local rackspaces. I guess I could feed it out through a virtual midi cable and back in, but I just wanted to check I hadn’t missed a more strmlined solution. If this isn’t possible, is there a reason for that, or is it just a matter of implementation?

I’m running windows 10 pro on a 16gb ram i7 machine, using an rme babyface pro interface. I’ve got the Akai fire, maschine mikro mk3, novation launchkontrol xl and m32 native control keyboard plugged in. I’m running the plugin alliance GP4 unlocked software

Cheers in advance all you helpful people.

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What is your use case for wanting to remove that “connection”?

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Hey dhj,

I’d like to be able to have various rackspaces set up, each loading their own version of the Flstudio plugin and each containing a ‘track’ (ie effectively a modular rig of sound devices that I can control wit the Fire hardware). When I switch rackspaces, I’d like the Fire to automatically connect to the newly loaded rackspace (specifically to the newly loaded instance of FLstudio in that rackspace). At the moment, it’s connecting to the first loaded instance, and then refusing to drop that connection, even when the rackspace in question is ‘red’ on the rackspace list.

it’s complicated by the fact that both bits of hardware have a soewhat specialised connection to their respective softwares. I don’t have to wire midi in in GP (or any daw) for them to be able to connect. If the software is running and the hardware is connected, they will find each other and communicate independently of GP’s midi routing. So i need to completely flush one instance before I load the next if this is to work. Does that make sense? Not sure If I’m explaining myself clearly.

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Yes there is. GP4 adds a new special parameter for each plugin for “Open/Close Plugin Editor". If you add a button widget and then go to map this widget to your plugin, you will see this special parameter in the list.

1 Like
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I see – frankly this feels more like a design flaw in the plugin – whoever built it did not plan for a host to load it multiple times – they should really fix that

You might want to consider using a separate GP instance with just that plugin

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Oh that’s awesome news! Thankyou, that solves one stumbling block immediately!

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Thanks dhj. Yes, would be lovely if they did, and it’s notable that maschine has a built in solution for that very scenario. Then again, FL is more of a fully fledged DAW, so I guess it may not have occurred to image line that many people would be trying to do that.

Just so I understand what’s going on (and therefore know what to reasonably ask of the software) when using predictive loading, what is GP not loading? It’s clearly still loading the plugins in rackspaces, at least in a state where they can establish independent midi connections. Please note, not a complaint in any way, just want to understand what’s going on under the hood so I’m not banging my head against a wall trying to get the software to do something it isn’t designed to do.

All good though. At the moment I have a working solution, with FL in the global rackspace sending midi (vi loopbe 30) to the normal rackspace, triggering sounds in maschine, the audio from which is then sent to the global rackspace and fed through the looping software. Seems pretty solid so far. Loses me a couple of the features I was going to use in FL, but nothing I can’t live without, and may be more versatile overall.

What would be the advantages of running the FL element in a seperate instance? Would they end up running on seperate cores? Or do all instances share one core with GP?

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All instances are independent, so it would use separate cores.