Strategy for Using Midi Guitar 3 and Other VST Intruments?

GP newbie who is replicating a Live VST host setup to one I had in Reaper. I had been using an external pedal board and am migrating over to pedal-less setup. I have all sorted out for conventional guitar sounds, but also using MG3’s inbuilt sounds. My desired outcome is a way to:

  1. Use MG3’ built-in sounds sometimes (I have this working)
  2. Use my various virtual instruments (SurgeXT, SpitFire Labs, Decent Sampler)
  3. Be able to choose which sounds are active and turn on/off the others.

In Reaper I had an MG3 specific track that had my 3 main synths available and I would bring up the FX interface for my MG3 track which head MG3 loaded into it (In Midi Guitar Mini mode), but the other VST instruments that I would move back and forth between). This worked, but is clunky , and was arrived at through trial and error.

As I stumble through GP, I’ve begun to understand the wiring piece, but also the panel and widgets piece. I also have a M-Vave SMC-Mixer which I have connected to and learned various behaviors (e.g. muting blocks, triggering different states in the VST etc…).

I think you’ll find that when using Gig Performer, it is best to keep everything modular and use variations/rackspaces/song parts to differentiate sounds and plugin usage.

I only use MG2 (and MG3) for audio-to-MIDI translation and nothing else.
Why?

  1. GP is a better plugin host than MG is.
  2. Keeping everything separate allows each individual plugin to do what it does best.
  3. It’s easier to control and act upon separate plugins within GP due to the nature of its design

How that would all relate to your own individual needs and uses is something you’ll have to find out for yourself, but as a general rule I would look to learn about how GP works first, and then orchestrate your use of MidiGuitar around that, rather than the other way around.

I managed to hack my way through this and created a dupe instance of MG3’s VST in the wiring, and set up a toggle in the panel to enable and disable it. Still on my hit list to make this work best for me is:

  1. Figure out how to stop the Dry Signal on my Tascam 4x4HR seeping to the output. It’s not obvious how to change that in the Tascam control panel
  2. Figure out how to move between patches with widgets. For each instrument I only use a few, so it would be great to be able to create widgets that would allow me to pick them from the Panel interface.

I am getting GP but like many things, it wasn’t obvious but started to reveal itself to me as I trial and errored it.

The user manual is worth reading — would save you a lot of trial and error :slight_smile:

Also, for your Decent Sampler plugin block shown in that last image, you might consider reducing the pin count display to just 2 or 4 so you don’t have to have such a wide plugin block with audio output pins that you probably don’t care about.

See item 15 in this section of the user manual :slight_smile:

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Guilty as charged :innocent: Thanks for the tip on the pins!

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