Korg Forums

[Dniss]

Hi there all,

I play in a group (for fun), and we have no intention of ever doing any live gigs. So keep in mind I don't do any composing or anything close to using something like Cubase between sessions.

I own a TE, and lately I've been looking into bringing some of those vintage VST keyboard when I play with the guys.

I have tons of questions but I'll try to keep it simple and condense.

1) How do you switch sound banks? Can it be done from the midi controler? I haven't purchased a controler yet, I need to find how it works before trowing cash at this.

2)Say I want to use 2 plug-in, how do I switch from one to the other? Any option aside using the mouse? Could I use Kore to map all my sounds and just use that as one huge sound bank?

3)Is there any way I can route the audio out from my laptop into my TE. I just wonder if I'll have to get a mixer because the PA only has one audio in right now (my triton).

As you see those are pretty basic questions. I'd appreciate any input some of you might have.

Best regards,
Dniss

[Wolfram1]

Good questions. I'm asking myself the same thing, and let me add a couple more questions before I buy a laptop and accesories:

4) Does my laptop need to be VST dedicated? I mean, no IM software nor internet nor other stuff? Because I was planning to use the laptop for VSTs, internet (avoiding surfing weird looking websites, of course), IM and MS Office. And I know the fear of working with laptops is to experience a crash while playing live, so I wanted some advice from experienced users.

5) How can I switch from the VST sounds to my Korg TR sounds and visceversa? Do I also need a midi controller for this? And what's more important...can I do this quickly? (the same goes to questions 1 and 2 made by Dniss).

6) Is there a way to take sounds from the VST (let's say, Sampletank), and export them to the TR with the SD card so I can play without a laptop?

Thank you in advance.

[Dniss]

Hi Wolfram1,

I could perhaps answer some of the questions here, I've done ALOT of research since my post. This part of the forum is pretty much dead so I'll try to help you.

Look for a product called Native Instruments Kore 1. It's a host software for various VST instruments. You can even look it up on Youtube, they have some nice demo of it. It's perfect for live performance. It comes with a hardware module that allows you to switch sounds without touching the computer. You could even plug a pedal switch into it.

You will surely have to get an external sound card to lower latency. Something such as EMU 1616. It allows you to plug your TR and a midi controller if you wish. Most laptop soundcard are to low quality and the USB midi connection really sucks for latency.

When running VST applications on your laptop, you'll have to shut down everything else. I mean, EVERYTHING you are not using. Such as AIM, and any resident program. VSTi use alot of cpu power.

I don't know much about the TR but are you able to import samples in .wav form? If you do, it's only a matter of recording in .wav format the sound from the VSTi. But I won't get into that subject too deep because I'm not an expert and I don't know the TR.

Expect lots of tweaking and playing around to get a good result when importing wave files. I think it's much easier to use it as is from the laptop. Specially if you decide to go with the Kore software. So unless you have a lot of spare time and infinite patience, don't waiste your time.

Don't forget the most VSTi synth have their own controls (joystick and wheel) that can be mapped on a midi controller. Just recording the sound won't give you the effect you'd get using those controls out of the box.

If you have questions don't hesitate, and if anyone want to add anything please feel free.

Regards,
Dniss

[Troy]

[kanthos]

First off, if you don't have Kore yet, get Kore 2. Kore 1 isn't really on the market anymore, and Kore 2 has many significant improvements. You can also get a software-only version now that doesn't have the hardware controller. If you're using a keyboard to play Kore sounds and you don't really want to tweak Kore sounds on the fly, the Kore Controller will probably be useless to you.


1 and 2) I've also done this kind of thing in Cubase, but I don't recommend it if you have Kore. Plus, Kore is good for other things than just hosting and organizing plugins and sounds for live playing.

You're a Kore user, so you have one of the best tools for live performance. If you're just messing around, it shouldn't be that hard to switch between sounds for a new song using your mouse. To make it easier, or if you ever did do any live gigging, you'd want to do the following.

Kore has a performance view that is great for this kind of thing. First thing you do is load all your plugins (unfortunately, you wouldn't want to load and unload plugins on the fly; maybe in an intermission, but some plugins take too long that if you went from one song right into the next, you'd still be waiting for plugins to load). Put each plugin on its own channel in the sound matrix.

Actually, I suggest that each sound matrix channel have 4 things on it. In order, they are MIDI Filter, MIDI Transformer, MIDI Program Change, and your plugin or Kore Sound. If you only want to ever play one group of sounds using your whole keyboard, then you can skip the filter and transformer; if you use multiple keyboards or want keyboard zones, these are necessary.

You'd use the Filter to set up zones by filtering out some part of the keyboard (i.e. to have a sound play on C4 and below) or, if you have multiple keyboards sending on multiple MIDI channels, to have a sound play for only one of the keyboards (filter out everything that's not on the desired channel).

You use the transformer to do a transposition, if you like, or to adjust velocity curves, or to change the MIDI channel that you're using (some VSTs expect data on MIDI channel 1, for example, but if you're playing on a keyboard sending on channel 2, you would use the transformer to change this). The Program Change lets you change the program for a single plugin.

If you have a plugin with multiple outputs and want it to play multiple different sounds at once (i.e. Kontakt), you can have some channels that just have some of the MIDI plugins and no sound, and route these channels to the one that actually has Kontakt loaded.

Ok, so you've got a bunch of sounds loaded. How do you work with a subset of them for a given song? Well, performance mode lets you save performance presets. Good news is that all the data for the MIDI plugins are saved on *each preset*, so you can, for example, have a MIDI Program Changer use two different programs for two different presets. Each preset should correspond to a song or part of a song.

You also want to disable all plugins that aren't in use for any presets that won't need them. This'll save CPU power and give you better performance.

You might also want to look at this to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. When I used to use Kore and a laptop for live performance, I used that page to figure out how to get it set up.



3) I'd recommend a smaller mixer. My live rig is two keyboards with 2 mono outs on each, and I use a Behringer MX-400. It's dirt cheap and the knobs aren't as solid as I want, but just for bringing in up to 4 different sounds into the PA, it's perfect.


4) Have all that other stuff installed; just don't have it in memory when you try to use your VSTs. Some people set up a separate user account just for music that doesn't load anything extra, and another one for gaming/surfing/etc that does. If you've already been surfing or working in Office and you want to work with audio, I recommend rebooting just to make sure everything is properly unloaded from memory.

5) Well, you'd ideally have both your computer and your TR sending into your mixer or amp. On the TR, I highly recommend using combi mode. If you want sounds from the TR, have one or more timbres in the combi of type INT. If you want sounds from your computer, have one or more timbres of type EXT. All other timbres should be set to OFF. Then, as you switch combis, you can use an EXT timbre to send a program change to your laptop. I suggest having your laptop and the TR using different MIDI channels, just to keep things clear.

6) Yes, but it's not recommended. You'd have to buy the sampling upgrade for the TR, if you don't already have it. You'd sample audio from your computer, save the audio as a multisample, make a program for that multisample, tweak the program, and save both the program and the samples on your SD card. Then, every time you turn on the TR, you'd have to load the multisample into memory.

This is only a good idea if you generally perform just with keyboards and need a sound or two live; it's a bad idea to try and use this method to switch from being a heavy laptop user to being laptop-free.

The drawbacks are these:

a) Loading samples from an SD card is slow. To load a full 64 MB of samples (the most RAM TR can have at once) can take a large amount of time. (When I was demoing samples downloaded from this site, I think I remember times of up to 10 minutes or so for a single multisample, and I never had anywhere near 64 MB in memory at once).

b) Samples are of a reduced quality. Think about it: how much data comes with SampleTank and how many sounds are there? 64 MB for a sample-based sound on your computer is tiny. The Kontakt 3 library doesn't have that many individual sounds, but its library is around 33 GB. A single trumpet, which doesn't span the range of the keyboard, is 120 MB in Kontakt 3.

You can reduce the size by not sampling every single note or by not having multiple velocity layers, but these obviously reduce the quality. Certainly, sampling a grand piano would be pointless; some of the best piano libraries use 30-60 GB for a *single piano*.

c) Sampling is a lot of work.

My advice is either to bring your laptop with you in addition to your other gear or to find comparable sounds on your hardware keyboards and drop the laptop.
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Keyboard Rig: Korg Kronos, Moog Sub 37, Waldorf Blofeld Module, Neo Instruments Ventilator II, Moog MiniFooger Delay, Strymon BigSky, Roland KC-150, Mackie 802-VLZ4 Mixer