Playing multiple intruments at once

[jeff hollan]

Hi! New to cakewalk and i really love it! But...I want to use it for live performance.  I have a dell with an icore5, 32 gig of ram, and a hard disk drive. Windows 10 with an presonus interface. I can load instruments, get them to play, my roland rd 2000 will even control the volumes with the sliders. Suppose i wanted to layer a piano (midi ch 1) with strings (midi ch 2). Inputs are the right midi channels amd output is master. Ive tried everything! Help!!!!

[David Baay]

Whether using  a multi-timbral synth or multiple single-instrument synths, to layer two soft synth sounds you just need to enable Input Echo on the two MIDI or Simple Instrument tracks outputting to the two synths or channels of a multi-timbral synth. By default, Cakewalk auto-echos the focused track, but you can force echo to stay on when a track is not in focus simply by clicking the input echo button - looks like ))).

 

[Jim Fogle]

What player are you using to host your virtual instruments?

Some players, the TTS-1 included with Cakewalk by BandLab for example, are polyphonic and multi-timbrel so they can receive multiple midi channels, play multiple instruments and have multiple outputs.  However many players accept midi from one channel, play one instrument and have one mono or stereo output.

[jeff hollan]

I was using cakewalk to host the vst (just downloaded it yesterday). I was using abelton before but for some reason abelton wont play the patches i got from roland cloud. Cakewalk will.  So the TTS-1 is included with cakewalk How do I find it? I found out how to layer two but it wont do more than that. Any help is greatly appreciated. 

[Robert Bone]

I suggest you consider using something like Cantabile, for layering sounds for live performance. Cakewalk is fantastic for recording, and can be used for live performance, but I always found it too slow at loading different projects, or even just switching to different layering of different instruments.

Cantabile lets you load up all kinds of VST plugin instances, and then you can load up sounds to each of the synths and then create snapshots with whichever combinations of sounds you wish, with the ones not involved for a given snapshot muted. You can insert effects at the bus or plugin level, or both, and one of its strengths is that you can tell it to leave plugins with sample-based sounds loaded, so that when you switch snapshots, it is instant, because it doesn't have to reload those samples as you switch snapshots.  So, each snapshot instantly switches the combinations of sounds and devices with a single program/snapshot change.

You can also control lighting, via midi as part of each snapshot, plus you can trigger midi files to play, and if you find and load up any of several different free vst media players, you can even then play audio backing tracks that are triggered for each snapshot, with a couple of ways to start or stop audio playback as desired.

They have a free trial, for 30 days, and they have one free lite version, and a couple more feature rich versions.

I love using Cantabile for vst hosting for live performance.   

Anyways, check it out. I use and love Cakewalk, for recording, mixing, and mastering. I additionally, but separately, love using Cantabile, for setting up and playing synth sounds in live performances.

Bob Bone

[jeff hollan]

Thank you so much Bob. This is what Im looking to do. First a screenshot so youll better understand. Im not real good at explaining. This is a shot of my rd 2000 by roland. Each fader is assignable. I want to assign midi channel 1 as a piano, 2 strings,3 hammond etc. I want to bring them in and out as i choose according to the song. Like if i want to layer 3 tracks i can, or 4, or 2, just by moving the slider. I have sounds that i love from Roland and Native that I want to use. Can cantible do that or does cakewalk have that capability? I was using abelton live 9 but it doesnt see my roland vsts for some reason. Any help is greatly appreciated. 

Jeff Hollan