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Why Vienna Ensemble Pro?

StillLife

Senior Member
I am thinking about Vienna Ensemble Pro lately. Wondering whether it will help my workflow, or will it be huge overkill?

I am an alternative singer/songwriter, who likes to incorperate orchestral elements in his music, but I am not sure how to manage these huge libraries the best. I am working inside Maschine lately, which has great workflow, but is not the best choice for vox and orchestra, maybe. I also have Cubase 9.5, which I like very much, but when working in it I miss Maschine's more immidiate, creation oriented workflow. Could VEP add, I wonder? Or is it mainly a tool for people who run multiple pc's in their setup?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
 
The purpose of VE Pro is primarily to distribute load across multiple systems. There are some secondary benefits, such as being able to create templates that can be used with multiple DAWs or across different DAW sessions.

However, VE Pro does not (for my workflow) make things "more immediate " or "creation oriented." It's an extra layer of complexity that should only be added if you need it.

I've personally gotten away from using VE Pro with Cubase. Disabled instrument tracks in Cubase are "more immediate" and less of a hassle IMO.

In my case, not using VE Pro makes my life simpler. If I were John Powell, I might feel differently.
 
It really just depends on your DAW computer's current limitations, the available DAW functionality, and how you intend to use it. My perspective is from using multiple VE-Pro slaves for writing contemporary orchestral production music rather than songwriter-focused work.

I'm using a very large DAW template where channel sets in the VE-Pro slave templates are already routed to match my DAW template and can just be loaded, unloaded, or swapped as needed in the rare instance I need something not in the primary template I use. It has been helpful for me to offload, from the DAW computer, the most CPU/RAM intensive instruments such as the orchestral libraries, then having those preloaded entirely to VE-Pro templates on another computer - I no longer really even have to think about freezing tracks to avoid overloading systems.

If I ever invest in an overly souped up main DAW computer again, I might consider reconfiguring but in general I'm not fond spending time loading/enabling/disabling tracks in my DAW as part of my workflow which is what led me to VE-Pro. The way it works my templates I can just filter the tracks on an articulation, instrument, section or other keyword and work on playing in parts.
 
The purpose of VE Pro is primarily to distribute load across multiple systems. There are some secondary benefits, such as being able to create templates that can be used with multiple DAWs or across different DAW sessions.

However, VE Pro does not (for my workflow) make things "more immediate " or "creation oriented." It's an extra layer of complexity that should only be added if you need it.

I've personally gotten away from using VE Pro with Cubase. Disabled instrument tracks in Cubase are "more immediate" and less of a hassle IMO.

In my case, not using VE Pro makes my life simpler. If I were John Powell, I might feel differently.
Spot on to what Symfoniq said, it's a massive layer of complexity you probably don't need. Using disabled INSTRUMENT tracks and/or templates built from them directly in Cubase is far simpler and straightforward in every way. The downside can be on really big template of 1000+ tracks that once you activate say 10+ tracks, the save time can get past 5 seconds and this is on a fast m2 drive, but that brief pause I can live with. Most of my current cues max out at 25-40 tracks and the save times are around 10 seconds once everything is fleshed out...
 
For orch work I love vep. There are pros and cons. It does add another layer of complexity and is not a creativity tool at all. What it does do though is provide a way for me to load and orchestra setup into vep, totally independent of my daw. You could use maschine with it, for example, then later load the same orchestra into vep to use with cubase. I also use Mirpro which integrates especially well with vep and provides a soundstage environment for orchestral mixing.

Some other pros, you can leave a set of instruments and samples that you always use loaded into vep and switch projects in your daw without having to reload all the samples.

When you disable a channel in vep it actuall does free the memory of any plugins that are on that channel, unlike logicpro and some others.

On the con side there is some extra latency to contend with and it’s a bit more complicated but it actually works very well.
 
For additional orchestra parts for songwriting you don't need big templates. I do a lot of "on top of a song" arrangements and even with full orchestra and one-track-per-instrument approach I rarely got over 60 tracks for the orchestra.
Probably the best way for a Maschine user would be exporting the basic song mix from Maschine and add it into Cubase, add the orchestral stuff and export the orchestra stems from Cubase back into Maschine.
 
Using a Cubase template with all disabled tracks is working fine for me, and I don't mind the save times. While my template is large and will get larger every day, I don't generally load a lot of instruments at the same time for my music. I'm not having problems so far.

What does concern me is that someday I will do compositions that are bigger, and will choke on me, with clicks and pops, etc. I suppose I could freeze tracks.l.

But if someday I will be forced to add VE Pro to my system, I'd prefer to go through the hassle now
rather than do it a year or two from now when my template is two or three times larger.

While I am a hobbyist working every day to increase my knowledge and experience with orchestral music, I think my desire will always be to write simpler music. I have no interests in epic. Even so, I realize that I could load up a few complex solo instruments that take up a lot of computer power.

I guess my questions are unanswerable because the future is unknown, but any advice you have would be appreciated.

I'm back and forth on buying VE Pro every day.
 
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