Orchestral Templates

[T on Y]

A Bit Of Background  - I'm a 62 year old who writes stuff for fun...

Is creating a template with all the Kontatk libraries  I have the start of a slippery slope ??,

Discuss !!!

[Cookie Jarvis]

I don't use templates...I never know what I'm inclined to write till I start. One thing I did setup was a default project with all my inputs and outputs etc. but no tracks. Now I can open that default project every time and do whatever I want. Templates are good if you do the same thing over and over.

Bill

[bitflipper]

Jeez, if I created a template with ALL my libraries I'd be waiting an hour for them to load, only to ultimately crash the DAW when I ran out of memory.

And yes, it definitely is a slippery slope. But then, so is just about everything else. Kontakt just happens to have an especially low viscosity.

However, it can be quite helpful to make templates, especially if you're into orchestral stuff or use super-configurable instruments such as Superior Drummer. And while I fully appreciate Bill's reluctance to be constrained by pre-selected instruments, templates needn't be restrictive. You can create as many as you like, and you're not obligated to always use them. 

[Some Guy]

On 9/22/2019 at 7:46 PM, Cookie Jarvis said:

I don't use templates...I never know what I'm inclined to write till I start. One thing I did setup was a default project with all my inputs and outputs etc. but no tracks. Now I can open that default project every time and do whatever I want. Templates are good if you do the same thing over and over.

Bill

That's why you use a template, so that when you are ready to write, you already have everything set up.

You can just disable or remove the tracks/folders you don't need.

For Orchestral stuff, a template is kind of necessary - especially if you're using a DAW that doesn't have somewhat sophisticated articulation management.

No one wants to create 20-80 tracks and organize, color code, add the track icons, add the Synths, set up the patches, etc. every single time they start a new project (and often I have multiple projects going on at the same time).

Track and Project Templates save a lot of time, and allow you to do the useless non-creative stuff once, and then forget about it until you have to upgrade the templates.

Memory is not an issue.  Even with a 60+ track template, you can load those projects and work with them on a machine with 8GB RAM in many cases.  Many people have tested (and confirmed) this - in Logic Pro X, Studio One Professional, REAPER, and other DAWs.  I'm struggling to think Cakewalk is any worse than Studio One when it comes to RAM usage ?

You can freeze tracks, remove unnecessary tracks/VSTis, etc.  Storage is usually a bigger issue than RAM (and both are cheap, anyways).  That, and CPU if you use a lot of plugins.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Some Guy