I’m a novice user of Gig Performer. I’m rather new to the whole VST/plugin world, and mostly trying to wrap my brain around best practices and practical use cases. I’m definitely drinking from a fire hose with all this!
I’m trying to understand the use case for widgets and panels from a keyboard player’s perspective. Gig Performer has an extensive library of widgets and editing functionality to generate some amazing panels, so I figure it must have a strong value for use cases beyond what I would have. But so far, as a keyboardist for an amateur cover band, I’ve only ever used widgets temporarily to make the connection between a MIDI control parameter to a VST’s parameter. For example, in one case I wanted to use my expression pedal to affect the filter cutoff on a plugin, so I:
Created a dial widget (could have been any continuous control widget, really)
Linked that dial widget to the cutoff parameter in the plugin
Used the MIDI-learn feature to tie that dial to my expression pedal
At this point, I never bother looking at the dial widget again. As far as I can tell, I no longer have any need for the widget, other than the fact that it’s kind of cool to see the dial turn on the screen as I play with the expression pedal.
So I have a couple of questions to check my understanding here:
Would it even be possible to connect the expression pedal to control the filter cutoff on the plugin in Gig Performer without using a widget at all? Or is this precisely the mechanism that allows that connection to happen?
Are there other recommended uses for panels specifically for keyboardists that I haven’t seen yet? There is one that I have started using – a diagram of the whole keyboard with labels to indicate split points for different parts and zones for a given song. Anything else?
Thanks for the discussion. As I said, this is as much a check of my understanding as anything else, so I hope this doesn’t come off as disparaging a very cool feature. To the contrary, I know it’s extremely valuable for various professional use cases. Just possibly not ones that I would encounter in my narrow world just yet.
This is exactly the question that I had when I started with GP, too.
There are two philosophies:
The ones like to recreate the look and feel of their synths with fancy and elaborated panels with dozens of widgets. So they don’t have to open the plug-in GUI and can edit sounds directly on the panels of songs or rackspaces. This is suited for “simple” plug-ins like drawbar organs or VA synths with only a few relevant parameters.
The others use widgets only then when they really want to control a particular parameter of a plug-in during live performance. This is my use case. In most of my rackspaces I have only one or two widgets on the panels, and many have none. With plug-ins like Omnisphere or NI Kontakt it would be simply impossible to have all relevant parameters mapped to widgets on a panel. Sound editing is done purely in the plug-in GUIs.
In principle, it would be possible to have a certain MIDI CC let control any plug-in parameter directly by settings of that plug-in. So what’s the point of widgets, I asked myself, too.
The point is the rig manager, where you can define aliases of MIDI devices and controllers. Then you learn the alias of a MIDI CC to a widget, which is in turn linked to a plug-in parameter.
If you once change your MIDI gear, you just have to redefine these aliases once in the rig manager, and all controller mappings of hundreds of songs, rackspaces and gigs will work on the fly. By direct routing of CC to plug-ins you would have to change each and every rackspace in each gig file, manually.
And yes, the widgets give you a visual feedback of the MIDI CC action during performance when the plug-in GUIs are usually closed.
I’m a keyboard player. It took me a while to understand how I would use widgets.While I was starting with GP I thought widgets were mainly for real-time control of parameters during a performance, like opening and closing a synth filter. Of course, widgets can be used for that.
But, I have come to view widgets as a central tool in ram management.
Basically widgets allow you to change numerous aspects of a sound without requiring another instance of the plugin.
For example, on every rackspace I use Joey’s Awaken 6 panel template (I only use the panel, not the rackspace) so I can control the volume of each sound (in the mixer) and see meter levels. I continue to revise these levels to get them right for each song part.
To me widgets go hand in hand with song parts. I can modify plugins in rackspaces almost infinitely by using bypasses (and adding new plugins). So, that way I can limit having multiple instances of the same sound (the Global Rackspace can also be used for this purposes, especially if you use a memory intensive sound a lot).
I usually change widget settings by changing song parts. So, in one song part I might have some plugins bypassed and different volumes and in another song part I might change those. So, I use the “snapshot” (“capture variation”) tool to save setting to different song parts. Then I can change song parts during a song to cover the different parts of the song. [Hope this made a bit of sense. Hah!]
Thanks for the replies! It’s exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for. I know there’s never any “one right way” to use Gig Performer – that’s part of what makes it such a great tool. These exchanges really help me to understand various approaches and to try out something new for myself.
As far as widget use is concerned, it really seems to boil down to one’s preferences for using a hardware MIDI device vs. on screen controls for live performance. Some of that preference I’m sure has to do with how flexible one’s MIDI controllers are. I tend toward the hardware control side, which is why I had the question in the first place.
I did find Angel’s comment about rig manager intriguing. Since I’m no pro, I only have my one keyboard that I ever currently use, so I haven’t had the need to start using rig manager (yet). But I could see how you might use widgets to design a panel that is a “universal virtual MIDI controller” that works across all hardware setups.
I am still somewhat curious about my question number 1: Can one connect a MIDI control to a plugin parameter without using a widget as a go-between?
When the plugin allows to midi map cc parameters you can do that,
But I would never do that because a parameter change in the plugin normally does not send back the midi message it reacts on.
When using widgets you can easily use an iPad to control and visualize parameter changes.
Only if the plugin parameter is directly accessible via MIDI, you cannot control host automation parameters via MIDI, they are completely different kinds of entities.
Among other reasons, the whole point of widgets is to act as a conversion mechanism between MIDI (integer values from 0 to 127) and host automation parameters (floating point values between 0.0 and 1.0)
