# How do you set up your orchestral template?



## elfman

I'm working on setting mine up right now. I only have Spitfire so I feel like balancing won't be that difficult.

Question: Do you load every instrument at once, or as you go? The first is obviously ideal for quick work flow but I feel like it could drown your ram.


----------



## Lassi Tani

I've loaded everything woodwinds, strings, brass and percussion, but purged them, thus saving ram. Basically I have legatos for each instrument in a separate track, but the rest I've grouped to shorts and longs. Thus e.g. for Violins 1 I have 1 Legato track, 1 Shorts track and 1 Longs track. I'm doing articulation switching with Cubase's Expression Maps. Also I'm sending the tracks to groups: Berlin Strings, Hollywood Strings, Soaring Strings, etc and they go to Strings, which go to Orchestra group. For reverb, I'm sending the library groups to FX channels, which have reverbs. The FX channels don't send straight to Output, but to Wet channel, which enables me to change the level of wetness from one fader. I have about 400 tracks, which is not too much, and enough for flexibilty in mixing, e.g. I can mix shorts differently from longs, which sometimes is handy. 

So basically my template looks like this:

Woodwinds
Berlin Woodwinds
Auddict Woodwinds
Albion Woodwinds
Metropolis 1 Woodwinds

Strings
Berlin Strings
Soaring Strings
Hollywood Strings
Albion Strings
Metropolis 1 Strings

Brass
Berlin Brass
Chris Hein Brass
Metropolis 1 Brass
Hollywood Brass

Percussion
Hollywood Orchestra Percussion
Albion Percussion
Metropolis 1 Percussion
ROP

FX channels
Berlin Woodwinds Reverb
Auddict Woodwinds Reverb
etc...

Group channels
Woodwinds
Berlin Woodwinds
Auddict Woodwinds
Albion Woodwinds
Metropolis 1 Woodwinds




Strings, etc..
Orchestra -> Stereo Out
WET -> Stereo Out

Stereo Out
Berlin Woodwinds, Berlin Strings, Berlin Brass and Hollywood Strings and Hollywood Brass come from VEPro, but I'm using the machine for that. Have been stable so far.


----------



## milesito

sekkosiki said:


> I've loaded everything woodwinds, strings, brass and percussion, but purged them, thus saving ram. Basically I have legatos for each instrument in a separate track, but the rest I've grouped to shorts and longs. Thus e.g. for Violins 1 I have 1 Legato track, 1 Shorts track and 1 Longs track. I'm doing articulation switching with Cubase's Expression Maps. Also I'm sending the tracks to groups: Berlin Strings, Hollywood Strings, Soaring Strings, etc and they go to Strings, which go to Orchestra group. For reverb, I'm sending the library groups to FX channels, which have reverbs. The FX channels don't send straight to Output, but to Wet channel, which enables me to change the level of wetness from one fader. I have about 400 tracks, which is not too much, and enough for flexibilty in mixing, e.g. I can mix shorts differently from longs, which sometimes is handy.
> 
> So basically my template looks like this:
> 
> Woodwinds
> Berlin Woodwinds
> Auddict Woodwinds
> Albion Woodwinds
> Metropolis 1 Woodwinds
> 
> Strings
> Berlin Strings
> Soaring Strings
> Hollywood Strings
> Albion Strings
> Metropolis 1 Strings
> 
> Brass
> Berlin Brass
> Chris Hein Brass
> Metropolis 1 Brass
> Hollywood Brass
> 
> Percussion
> Hollywood Orchestra Percussion
> Albion Percussion
> Metropolis 1 Percussion
> ROP
> 
> FX channels
> Berlin Woodwinds Reverb
> Auddict Woodwinds Reverb
> etc...
> 
> Group channels
> Woodwinds
> Berlin Woodwinds
> Auddict Woodwinds
> Albion Woodwinds
> Metropolis 1 Woodwinds
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Strings, etc..
> Orchestra -> Stereo Out
> WET -> Stereo Out
> 
> Stereo Out
> Berlin Woodwinds, Berlin Strings, Berlin Brass and Hollywood Strings and Hollywood Brass come from VEPro, but I'm using the machine for that. Have been stable so far.



Are you using Dry/close Mic's for your libraries? Also, why do you need to have a shorts and longs separate if they all go to the same bus where you add the same amount of reverbs to shorts and longs?


----------



## Lassi Tani

milesito said:


> Are you using Dry/close Mic's for your libraries? Also, why do you need to have a shorts and longs separate if they all go to the same bus where you add the same amount of reverbs to shorts and longs?



I'm using a mixture of close and tree mics. I have them separate because sometimes I want to eq just the shorts.


----------



## Threedog

sekkosiki said:


> I've loaded everything woodwinds, strings, brass and percussion, but purged them, thus saving ram. Basically I have legatos for each instrument in a separate track, but the rest I've grouped to shorts and longs. Thus e.g. for Violins 1 I have 1 Legato track, 1 Shorts track and 1 Longs track. I'm doing articulation switching with Cubase's Expression Maps. Also I'm sending the tracks to groups: Berlin Strings, Hollywood Strings, Soaring Strings, etc and they go to Strings, which go to Orchestra group. For reverb, I'm sending the library groups to FX channels, which have reverbs. The FX channels don't send straight to Output, but to Wet channel, which enables me to change the level of wetness from one fader. I have about 400 tracks, which is not too much, and enough for flexibilty in mixing, e.g. I can mix shorts differently from longs, which sometimes is handy.
> 
> So basically my template looks like this:
> 
> Woodwinds
> Berlin Woodwinds
> Auddict Woodwinds
> Albion Woodwinds
> Metropolis 1 Woodwinds
> 
> Strings
> Berlin Strings
> Soaring Strings
> Hollywood Strings
> Albion Strings
> Metropolis 1 Strings
> 
> Brass
> Berlin Brass
> Chris Hein Brass
> Metropolis 1 Brass
> Hollywood Brass
> 
> Percussion
> Hollywood Orchestra Percussion
> Albion Percussion
> Metropolis 1 Percussion
> ROP
> 
> FX channels
> Berlin Woodwinds Reverb
> Auddict Woodwinds Reverb
> etc...
> 
> Group channels
> Woodwinds
> Berlin Woodwinds
> Auddict Woodwinds
> Albion Woodwinds
> Metropolis 1 Woodwinds
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Strings, etc..
> Orchestra -> Stereo Out
> WET -> Stereo Out
> 
> Stereo Out
> Berlin Woodwinds, Berlin Strings, Berlin Brass and Hollywood Strings and Hollywood Brass come from VEPro, but I'm using the machine for that. Have been stable so far.



Do you have for each track one instance of Kontakt , or for one group -> one instance? 

I'm struggeling a little bit in cubase with that. In Ableton Live it is possible to link multiple instrument tracks (which contains one midi and one audio track) too an instance of Kontakt.


----------



## Lassi Tani

Threedog said:


> Do you have for each track one instance of Kontakt , or for one group -> one instance?
> 
> I'm struggeling a little bit in cubase with that. In Ableton Live it is possible to link multiple instrument tracks (which contains one midi and one audio track) too an instance of Kontakt.



I have one instance for each track.

So you would like to use 1 Kontakt instance and several midi tracks. Just choose the midi output and midi channel from the Inspector for each midi track.


----------



## Puzzlefactory

I’ve recently gone ultra simple with my template. 

Because batch resave makes load times really short, I don’t feel the need to have everything loaded.

My new template in Logic consists of 5 track stacks (groups) for strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion and sound design. Each one has an empty Kontakt in. 

I then just duplicate the tracks as I go along and load different articulations into the duplicate Kontakts. 

I also setup two reverb buses, one convolution and one algorithmic. 

I route the empty kontakts sends to the reverbs and set the faders to -10db for headroom, so that every time I duplicate the track it’s all ready to go.


----------



## davidgary73

hodshonf said:


> i am just getting back into all this.
> 
> i just bought Vienna Ensemble Pro 6 this week and use it for all my VIs.
> 
> it really is nice to have Studio One Pro 3.5.5 running without the CPU hit.
> 
> great organizational too.
> 
> anyone else using VEP 6?



Tons of users here using VEP and yup, DAW no longer gets crunched up with CPU overloads etc. 

As for template, no longer use them. Just choose what is appropriate for the project/movie cues and mix as i go along in VEP 6


----------



## Jeremy Spencer

davidgary73 said:


> Tons of users here using VEP and yup, DAW no longer gets crunched up with CPU overloads etc.
> 
> As for template, no longer use them. Just choose what is appropriate for the project/movie cues and mix as i go along in VEP 6



I have actually gone back to this method, and I don't miss loading up those big templates.


----------



## Frank1

I'm new to the composers forum and I have a few questions on setting up kontakt or VEP for orchestral work/writing?

From what I have read it seems kontakt is cpu intensive, where vep is not. Is that correct?

How do you setup Kontakt or VEP in the form of a orchestral template?


----------



## danbo

EastWest only. Simple, just load up the Logic orchestra template and replace the VI's with EWHO instruments. Add articulation sets and the articulations you want you're done, works for me at least.


----------



## Glen Brown

Frank1 said:


> I'm new to the composers forum and I have a few questions on setting up kontakt or VEP for orchestral work/writing?
> 
> From what I have read it seems kontakt is cpu intensive, where vep is not. Is that correct?
> 
> How do you setup Kontakt or VEP in the form of a orchestral template?



VEP allows you to split the processing power across multiple machines, the idea being that you would have instances of Kontakt loaded up on each machine rather than having every loaded on one machine which eats processing power (and RAM).

This video explains the process quite well: 

Glen


----------



## Zoot_Rollo

Currently having fun creating a master template of ALL my VIs using Cubase.

Disabled tracks and mix console configurations make this pleasurably manageable.

Studio What?


----------



## MartinH.

Zoot_Rollo said:


> Currently having fun creating a master template of ALL my VIs using Cubase.
> 
> Disabled tracks and mix console configurations make this pleasurably manageable.
> 
> Studio What?



Not sure if this is a Reaper-only-thing, but when I load lots of libraries in a template, the time it takes to save the project grows to ridiculous lengths and the project files get in the hundreds of megabytes big. Is that not the case in other DAWs?
For me it would be entirely unfeasible to have everything I own loaded in one template, and I don't even have that many libraries. Some of the NI stuff adds ~4mb per loaded instance (library instance, not just Kontakt instance) to the project filesize, it's ridiculous.


----------



## Zoot_Rollo

MartinH. said:


> Not sure if this is a Reaper-only-thing, but when I load lots of libraries in a template, the time it takes to save the project grows to ridiculous lengths and the project files get in the hundreds of megabytes big. Is that not the case in other DAWs?
> For me it would be entirely unfeasible to have everything I own loaded in one template, and I don't even have that many libraries. Some of the NI stuff adds ~4mb per loaded instance (library instance, not just Kontakt instance) to the project filesize, it's ridiculous.




This is more of an exercise to learn Cubase (recent switch from S1).

AND

Take inventory of all the libraries i've devoured the last 6 months or so.

I'll probably settle into half a dozen smaller templates as starters for projects


----------



## kenose

MartinH. said:


> Not sure if this is a Reaper-only-thing, but when I load lots of libraries in a template, the time it takes to save the project grows to ridiculous lengths and the project files get in the hundreds of megabytes big. Is that not the case in other DAWs?
> For me it would be entirely unfeasible to have everything I own loaded in one template, and I don't even have that many libraries. Some of the NI stuff adds ~4mb per loaded instance (library instance, not just Kontakt instance) to the project filesize, it's ridiculous.


Definitely not Reaper only, I recently switched from a ~800 track Cubase disabled template to ~3000 (including outputs, so more like 1500 actual VIs) tracks using Cubase + VEPro. The old disabled track template was ~250-300mb fresh! The new template is a much more manageable 60mb.

What pushed me over the edge was the autosaves taking upwards of 30s-1m.... every 5 minutes. I was going insane!


----------



## MichaelVakili

I just have named channels ,mix busses and 5 opened kontakts. 
Basically 5 channels strings, 5 brass, 5 perc, 3 wood, 5 sound design and they are send to empty busses. No fx, no instruments. In my opinion if you are going to put instruments on a go - purge all the samples before you create the template so that only the UI is loaded without annihilating your CPU.


----------



## MartinH.

kenose said:


> Definitely not Reaper only, I recently switched from a ~800 track Cubase disabled template to ~3000 (including outputs, so more like 1500 actual VIs) tracks using Cubase + VEPro. The old disabled track template was ~250-300mb fresh! The new template is a much more manageable 60mb.
> 
> What pushed me over the edge was the autosaves taking upwards of 30s-1m.... every 5 minutes. I was going insane!



Yeah, I know the feeling. I turned down the autosave interval to 30min because of it (and yes, I do lose stuff to crashes regularly). I'm at 230mb project size with just 83 tracks... so maybe other DAWs do this a little better? But I love reaper, not gonna switch to cubase because of this. If reaper users have recommendations though, I'm all ears!


----------



## kenose

MartinH. said:


> Yeah, I know the feeling. I turned down the autosave interval to 30min because of it (and yes, I do lose stuff to crashes regularly). I'm at 230mb project size with just 83 tracks... so maybe other DAWs do this a little better? But I love reaper, not gonna switch to cubase because of this. If reaper users have recommendations though, I'm all ears!


230mb with only 83 tracks does sound like a lot! I haven't used Reaper too extensively, but I was always under the impression it was famously lightweight.


----------



## MartinH.

kenose said:


> 230mb with only 83 tracks does sound like a lot! I haven't used Reaper too extensively, but I was always under the impression it was famously lightweight.



I've spent an hour or so googling and the problem does seem to be present in other DAWs too, but to a lesser extend, because they save in binary file formats and reaper uses a "human readable" text file format. E.g. a project with just an empty Kontakt instance saves as 8kb, if I load the Action Strikes ensemble patch the project file grows to over 10 mb. If I add a second instance of that patch within the same kontakt instance, it's over 20mb already with just 2 patches loaded. It's crazy... 
I assume this is more a Kontakt / NI issue than a reaper issue. All other aspects of Reaper are very lightweight and high-performance indeed. As far as I can tell, there is no fix and the problem has been known about for many many years. 
There is an option not to save the full plugin state, but that's not recommended and breaks things. And I already set all the options for "minimal undo state" or "don't save undo history" etc..


----------



## kenose

MartinH. said:


> I've spent an hour or so googling and the problem does seem to be present in other DAWs too, but to a lesser extend, because they save in binary file formats and reaper uses a "human readable" text file format. E.g. a project with just an empty Kontakt instance saves as 8kb, if I load the Action Strikes ensemble patch the project file grows to over 10 mb. If I add a second instance of that patch within the same kontakt instance, it's over 20mb already with just 2 patches loaded. It's crazy...
> I assume this is more a Kontakt / NI issue than a reaper issue. All other aspects of Reaper are very lightweight and high-performance indeed. As far as I can tell, there is no fix and the problem has been known about for many many years.
> There is an option not to save the full plugin state, but that's not recommended and breaks things. And I already set all the options for "minimal undo state" or "don't save undo history" etc..


Wow, that seems like it would be a workflow killer for many people. 20mb project file with two patches is nuts.


----------



## MartinH.

kenose said:


> Wow, that seems like it would be a workflow killer for many people. 20mb project file with two patches is nuts.



It varies extremely and 10mb per patch is the biggest I've seen. The Action Strikes "hits" patch adds about 0.7 mb, and Metropolis Ark 1 patches seem to add roughly 2 to 4mb each.


I know we have quite a few Reaper users here, do you all use VEPro or don't have big templates with lots of libraries loaded?


----------



## Quasar

MartinH. said:


> It varies extremely and 10mb per patch is the biggest I've seen. The Action Strikes "hits" patch adds about 0.7 mb, and Metropolis Ark 1 patches seem to add roughly 2 to 4mb each.
> 
> 
> I know we have quite a few Reaper users here, do you all use VEPro or don't have big templates with lots of libraries loaded?



I've made a few large templates (approx 400 tracks), but use custom actions so that the tracks are all in a default disabled state upon opening, then can either use Alt+E to enable/Alt+D to disable selected tracks, or use toolbar buttons created on the Main Toolbar to do the same. I got some help a couple of years ago to figure out a good way to do this, and it works splendidly. When the tracks are disabled, they consume virtually no system resources and the template loads extremely quickly. But tracks can be easily and quickly activated as needed.

The macros are setup as follows:

Disable:
Xenakios/SWS: Set selected tracks record unarmed
Track: Set all FX offline for selected tracks
Xenakios/SWS: Bypass FX of selected tracks
Track: Lock track controls

Enable:
Track: Unlock track controls
Track: Set all FX online for selected tracks
Xenakios/SWS: Unbypass FX of selected tracks
Xenakios/SWS: Set selected tracks record armed

Then in Theme Development you can tweak the color of your locked track overlay color and transparency to taste. I like to make it fairly obvious at a glance whether a track is disabled or not.


----------



## MartinH.

Quasar said:


> I've made a few large templates (approx 400 tracks), but use custom actions so that the tracks are all in a default disabled state upon opening, then can either use Alt+E to enable/Alt+D to disable selected tracks, or use toolbar buttons created on the Main Toolbar to do the same. I got some help a couple of years ago to figure out a good way to do this, and it works splendidly. When the tracks are disabled, they consume virtually no system resources and the template loads extremely quickly. But tracks can be easily and quickly activated as needed.
> 
> The macros are setup as follows:
> 
> Disable:
> Xenakios/SWS: Set selected tracks record unarmed
> Track: Set all FX offline for selected tracks
> Xenakios/SWS: Bypass FX of selected tracks
> Track: Lock track controls
> 
> Enable:
> Track: Unlock track controls
> Track: Set all FX online for selected tracks
> Xenakios/SWS: Unbypass FX of selected tracks
> Xenakios/SWS: Set selected tracks record armed
> 
> Then in Theme Development you can tweak the color of your locked track overlay color and transparency to taste. I like to make it fairly obvious at a glance whether a track is disabled or not.



Thanks for the recommendation! But I believe that addresses a different issue. At least I can't imagine how freezing tracks would prevent the project file from getting big because the plugin settings need to be saved either way or else they would get lost. 
Can you please check how big the .rpp file of your biggest orchestral template is on your harddisk? That would be interesting to know. 

RAM isn't the issue here because the RAM load of the loaded sample libraries should not affect the saving time of the project file. It will affect the loading time (greatly) compared to your method, but I only load once and save often, so I'm more worried about optimizing the saving time, especially to make a quicker autosave interval feasible.


----------



## Quasar

MartinH. said:


> Thanks for the recommendation! But I believe that addresses a different issue. At least I can't imagine how freezing tracks would prevent the project file from getting big because the plugin settings need to be saved either way or else they would get lost.
> Can you please check how big the .rpp file of your biggest orchestral template is on your harddisk? That would be interesting to know.
> 
> RAM isn't the issue here because the RAM load of the loaded sample libraries should not affect the saving time of the project file. It will affect the loading time (greatly) compared to your method, but I only load once and save often, so I'm more worried about optimizing the saving time, especially to make a quicker autosave interval feasible.



On the hard disk itself, in Reaper's Project Templates folder, my largest "master" template currently has 358 tracks, and the .rpp weighs in at 163 MB. It loads virtually instantaneously in its disabled state (about the same as empty tracks would), and in Reaper's Performance tab in the dock it shows CPU hovering between approx. 0.6% and 1.0% (i7 2600).

The utilized RAM displays as 454 MB. Just as an experiment, I enabled 6 selected Kontakt 5 Spitfire Albion instrument tracks (with a single click) and the memory usage then jumped to about 3 GB.

Disabling and locking a track in Reaper is different than freezing it, though I don't know the nuances of how that all works in terms of resource consumption. All I know is that I can have fairly large templates without long waiting times and without fuss, and that performance and resource limitations do not seem to come into play until the active project itself gets too large, IOW too full of fully-unlocked, enabled tracks.

EDIT: I haven't analyzed saving times, but it hasn't been a noticeable issue, as I believe that when saving the time is only affected by the enabled tracks active in the project, and that the disabled, locked and unused tracks do not add to the amount of time it takes to save a project. Or if they do, it's not significant.


----------



## MartinH.

Quasar said:


> On the hard disk itself, in Reaper's Project Templates folder, my largest "master" template currently has 358 tracks, and the .rpp weighs in at 163 MB. It loads virtually instantaneously in its disabled state (about the same as empty tracks would), and in Reaper's Performance tab in the dock it shows CPU hovering between approx. 0.6% and 1.0% (i7 2600).
> 
> The utilized RAM displays as 454 MB. Just as an experiment, I enabled 6 selected Kontakt 5 Spitfire Albion instrument tracks (with a single click) and the memory usage then jumped to about 3 GB.
> 
> Disabling and locking a track in Reaper is different than freezing it, though I don't know the nuances of how that all works in terms of resource consumption. All I know is that I can have fairly large templates without long waiting times and without fuss, and that performance and resource limitations do not seem to come into play until the active project itself gets too large, IOW too full of fully-unlocked, enabled tracks.
> 
> EDIT: I haven't analyzed saving times, but it hasn't been a noticeable issue, as I believe that when saving the time is only affected by the enabled tracks active in the project, and that the disabled, locked and unused tracks do not add to the amount of time it takes to save a project. Or if they do, it's not significant.



Thanks a lot for giving me all that info! It turns out you were right all along and I was making the wrong assumptions. I saw both filesize and saving time increase roughly in sync, thus I thought the filesize _causes _the longer delay and that anything that doesn't affect filesize couldn't also affect saving time - which is wildly incorrect as it turns out. When I save an empty project with just 8x kontakt instances with one action strikes ensemble patch each, that takes about 18 seconds to save, but when I freeze all tracks it saves basically instantaneously. This is huge! I need to rethink how I'm handling my template in regards to freezing tracks. So far I always had enough RAM to keep everything loaded and valued the convenience of not having to deal with the delays for freezing and unfreezing tracks, but now that I know it can cut down dramatically on saving times, I need to rething that approach and at the very least freeze all the tracks that I haven't used in a project yet. 

Thanks!


----------

