I play at a church in a very contemporary, full band. I’m the synth player. I use 2 controllers, a PC and a ton of plugins. I’ve been using Cantabile for a year now and don’t have any major complaints. However, I really love the graphics oriented approach to Gig Performer. It’s top-notch! I’m also really drawn to the patch persistent feature. My band director is always asking me to fill the gaps with sound – or we will move to a new song quickly and my sounds haven’t fully died out. When switching between songs, Cantabile abruptly cuts out sounds. It does pre-load all of the plugins in a set list, so they are available instantly, but there’s no carry-over at all.
This week I set up our 5-song set list in both programs. In GP I did miss some of the advanced MIDI filtering that Cantabile offers, but duplicating each song was fairly quick and easy. With the help of David Jameson, I was able to add a script to open my chord charts for each song like I have set up in Cantabile. In my home rig I use a Focusrite Scarlette interface. At church I use a Dante virtual sound card to send “digital sound” to our Yamaha, Dante-enabled mixer (see https://www.audinate.com/products/software/dante-virtual-soundcard for more info). I didn’t have time to test out GP with Dante before this morning. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The program saw the driver and reconfigured everything correctly, but no signal was getting to the mixer. I could have bailed to analog through my headphone jack, but instead I decided to use Cantabile. So, that’s the first thing that would need to be looked into if I were to switch. I doubt you have a ton of customers who use Dante… but I do.
While the sound persistent feature is at the top of list of things I like about GP, I did have an issue with it. The two songs that needed to run together this week were both mainly powered by Omnisphere… airy pads with long decays. I could hold notes and switch, but when I did there was an audible sound – and not in the same key I was playing in. It sounded like a few random notes being quickly played together. I was using a drum pad on my Keylab to switch songs… but the sound occurred whether I used the mouse or the pad to switch. And it occurred in both directions between those two songs. It didn’t happen if I wasn’t holding notes, and it didn’t happen in between other songs that I could tell. So, that’s a mystery to me and I’d want to know why it happened and if I’d be running into that problem very often.
I’m not anxious to have to reconfigure all the songs I’ve already routed in Cantabile, but if I can switch songs with patch persistence it would be worth it. I’ve asked about it for Cantabile, but I don’t think it’s a priority for them. I also like that GP is cross-platform… and I love the graphics!
Thanks for the trial and I look forward to hearing from you.
Oh, one more question – maybe a request. I play the capo version of some songs if it’s in a key that I’m uncomfortable with. I thought that the transpose section of GP was per song, but it seems to be global. So I had to go in and re-transpose each instance of my MIDI ins. Is it possible to have one transpose section that would adjust all MIDI ins at the same time? Thanks!
I have not heard of any issues with Dante. When you say that no sound was getting to the mixer, can you be a bit more specific? In particular, when you play something, do you see the green LEDs flashing on the output channels faders at the bottom right of the GP main window?
Regarding Omnisphere, unfortunately I still need you to be a bit more specific? You said “mainly powered by Omnisphere”. So what else is there? What kind of “audible sound”? What else is in your rackspace?
I’m curious as to what kind of advanced MIDI filtering you’re looking for? There are so many many MIDI processor plugins out there, many even free, that it seemed unnecessary for us to focus too much on that area which is why our MIDI filter is not particularly complicated. Same reason GP doesn’t come with synths or effects - there are so many out there it seemed silly for us to try and make our own. Having said that, GP Script will let you do all kinds of advanced MIDI processing.
Adding rackspace specific transpose is on our list but in the meantime, you can always use GP Script to set the desired transpose in an On Activate callback using the SetGlobalTranspose function.
Let me recover from jamming this morning and I’ll take some screenshots and maybe a vid-cap of what I’m experiencing. As far as Dante, all the right lights were flashing. We didn’t have time to do any troubleshooting. I may go in before rehearsal Wednesday and work with our sound engineer to see if we can figure it out.
If those lights on the bottom right were flashing, then audio is leaving Gig Performer as those lights actually represent audio levels seen at the output of the audio interface. Could something be muted elsewhere? Are you certain you were sending audio to the correct channels of your mixer?
Unfortunately, it’s hard to diagnose this kind of thing remotely. Where are you located? Might make sense to do a desktop sharing session as well.
I have a theory about the wonky Omnisphere audio behavior when switching from one rackspace to another… i have experienced the same thing. Check your Omnisphere fx routing to see if any delay or echo fx are being used. If so, then bypass them and then repeat your exercise of changing rackspaces while your Omnisphere sounds are being sustained. I suspect this will resolve your audio glitches. If this does resolve, then you could create a rackspace variation that either bypasses or adjusts your Omnisphere delay settings prior to changing rackspaces so that you no longer experience this.
Again, this is just a theory, so hopefully it works.
@Andy I’ll give that a try when I’m working in my studio tomorrow. Thanks! @David This is a crazy week. I’m getting a kid ready for college and the church has Vacation Bible School (kids everywhere). I can’t get in there before Wednesday night to troubleshoot Dante. I’ll see what I can do and get back to you ASAP. Thanks so much for the help.
@dhj I haven’t given up on GP, but my trial has expired. Between the 4th and other stuff, I haven’t had a chance to play with it . Is there any chance I could get an extension code? I might switch from Cantabile if I can figure out a few things and work out the Dante issue. Thanks!
Does cantabile have patch/songlist for sets?, that’s good. I’m looking into gp, have bidule for running Omni live, but haven’t figured out how to quickly change between multis , apparently ms does this by propriety ‘ patches’, so one isn’t unloading, then loading multis , which logically is hard to understand how it’s faster than standalone unless it’s samples are loaded already just not activated , but then cpu overload ? any one verify ?
Can you describe your use-case a little more – there are different ways to approach this depending on what you’re doing. If you’re coming from the Cantabile world, you’re probably loading all plugins in one go, something you do not have to do in the GP world.
I use the spectrasonics tr iPad app in live mode to choose/ touch different patch layers , then would like to choose another multi ( again in live mode with tr)
If I understand you correctly, you want to load different sets of multis, and then turn on/off different patches of those multis.
It sounds like you should use a different rackspace with an instance of Omnisphere in it for each multi that you want to load. You can then switch instantly from one rackspace to another to get your new multi.
Not sure exactly how that iPad app works but people generally do that kind of thing by just using widgets to turn on or off those patches and then controlling those widgets directly from a keyboard controller or from an iPad running an app like Lemur, TouchOSC or some other OSC/MIDI app (many of which are free) on the iPad.
The advantage of that over your spectrasonics app is that you’re not limited to Omnisphere and you can do the same kind of control with arbitrary plugins.
You might want to take a look at this blog article we wrote about using Omnisphere Live
In one way the tr app is irrelevant , because once Omni is open, that’s when one can use the app for the patches in the multi, but is not loading more than one instance of Omni duplicating a daw, where you can load till cpu diminishes , ?what I’m curious about is, can GP open a gp patch with Omni w/o delay time
When you load a gigfile, which consists of multiple rackspaces, each of which contains a collection of plugins, you can switch from one rackspace to another rackspace essentially instantaneously.
There’s nothing special about Omnisphere — instantaneous changing can be done with arbitrary sounds.
For example, below is a YouTube video (which I actually didn’t even know existed until a few minutes ago) from the encore of a recent show I did with one of my bands. The encore starts with a medley that I’m playing just using Gig Performer and if you watch it you’ll notice that there are multiple places where the sounds change completely and it happens instantaneously (along with ability to persist previous sounds until I release keys or sustain pedal)
If that’s the kind of thing you’re trying to achieve then the answer is it’s pretty trivial to do that with Gig Performer
Nice!, So it’s not the same as a daw with many instances open killing cpu, but instead 1 patch ( whether a multi or patch) loaded, then moving to the next ?
What you call a “patch”, we refer to as a “rackspace” which is a collection of plugins connected together. Each rackspace can have a completely different set of plugins and you can switch from one to another instantaneously, as I’m doing in that performance. As soon as the previous rackspace is not needed anymore (if you’re using patch persist, the previous rackspace might stay active until you release all notes you were holding when you switched) it essentially turns off. Unlike a DAW, Gig Performer is focused on live performance so the criteria/needs are quite different.
Tempo per Gp patch question ?, is tempo per patch possible instead of global , in other words , if I load a Omni multi, can gp save tempo with it, then switch tempo at next one?
