You are getting a lot of terrific advice here,
@Rossy . You have to make some decisions about how to proceed early on, and you might not yet appreciate the pros and cons of those decisions until you get to working with a particular library or as you develop your workflow in general. Many of these pros and cons are agnostic with regard to your DAW, but some of the strategies are a little more DAW specific. Since you are on Cubase, you have the advantage of disabling tracks which, as you have learned, saves you a ton of RAM. You can also "hide" unused tracks which allows you to have things preconfigured, but not cluttering your workspace - having your cake and eating it too, so to speak. You also have the advantage of saving groups of tracks preconfigured (as with other DAWs) but not all of the routing is saved and quite frankly I have not figured out how to write a script to do that, as
@robgb has.
Another major decision is to have one track for each articulation vs one track for one instrument with all of that instrument's articulation, as
@ed buller mentioned. This is not DAW specific, but an important decision because it affects how you route and how you write. I personally would love to write with one instrument (e.g. violin) per track, but I find that many libraries have different negative track delays for different articulations (e.g. a pizzicato may require a much shorter negative track delay than a legato). So if you want to stay on the grid (which I prefer since it is easier to make edits such as lengthening the B section of a piece, etc.), what negative track delay value do you use? The pizzicato or the legato? Do you split the difference? Do you nudge notes? I find that the compromises to these are annoying and very problematic for some libraries. Check out the negative track delay sticky in the sample talk section by
@David Kudell. Watch his video if you have not! I did not appreciate how important this issue was when I started, but it makes a world of difference.
You will always make a compromise about this one way or another, but for me I have a bit of a hybrid approach. I typically use three negative track delays per instrument (e.g. violin) and therefore have three tracks for a given instrument: shorts, longs, legato, and I use my own articulation maps within each of those groups (to switch, say, between pizzicato and staccato both of which are in my "shorts" track). I divide shorts and longs since these almost always have very different negative track delay values and it means that I compromise timing a little less at the expense of having three tracks instead of one single one for an instrument (but I am not in one articulation per track land either). And remember that with Kontakt instruments, you can disable articulations you do not need, so you are not dogging your RAM that way if you are smart about it. Some people also like routing shorts and longs to different amounts of reverb and that has that advantage too.
Some really great videos have been recommended. Since you use Cubase, I'd also recommend two other people to watch: Anne Kathrin Dern has terrific tutorials on her YouTube channel. In addition to the high quality of her work and her clear teaching style, she uses Cubase and explains her decision making in her videos. She has a three part series on building a template that begins with
this video. I do not use VEP Pro (yet) so some of this may not apply, but seeing how she organizes things is key. The other two videos will probably help you a little more, but I appreciated all three. Note that she is a track per articulation kind of person. Another set of videos that you will find helpful are from
@MarcusD (a.k.a. PoundSound). He also uses Cubase and also has a three part series about template building using Kontakt, beginning with
this video. What I particularly appreciated about this series is that he shows you a few different ways to approach template building, but more importantly, he discusses the pros and cons of each one. He also discusses some various approaches to routing, which is another major decision that you will need to make early on in your build. Add to all of this that there is variation between different libraries.
Oy vey! It can be like a full time job, as
@danstein mentioned. Maybe some people like that sort of thing, but not me. Still, I think that you should grapple with some of these issues sooner than later, because you will grapple with them either way but will spend less time if you grapple with them sooner. But once you get a handle on that, you can make music more efficiently without tech getting in the way. Isn't making music what this is all about??
