Build huge templates?

True, but it’s a very time consuming task to audition and load up your instruments every time you want to get creative. Especially with film, where you could spend hours sifting through your sounds. With templates, it’s all right there ready to go. And in C7.5, you can hide all of the tracks you don’t want to see.

Ahh, same path not in my case, the template is the frame, it’s the vst’s that I save by project and or genere and swap those as needed for each project…

ahh I see, I really like this workflow idea , process of yours, modular / cue approach… I have a VEpro license its two years old , I abandoned it so I will take a look at this in between projects. Are you getting zero, or low latency from slave to master? Given the large amount of tracks you can dump into the master project without the limitations of an ADAT audio card, how do you deal with Cubase limitations on internal outputs on the master sequencer ?

My slave right now is dedicated to brass and strings only, and its all on key-switches and routed into my template so I turn on the slave and dont need to tinker, nor have it take up monitor space, this leaves three monitors for my project views, the 4th monitor plays the video.

I actually work in MIDI for the entire score,( including rendering one stereo stem from midi for purposes of review ) until all revisions are made and approved, then I render all tracks, do a rough mix, and deliver to post house. Obviously the advantages are huge in flexibility to make changes, copy and paste parts across cues, add an octave to a string part or change the melody in the middle of a sequence on the fly all without audio tracks to deal with, or re-do, etc.

This reminds me of something I heard in an interview with Brian Eno. He said when he got a new synth, the first thing he did was delete all the presets so they wouldn’t influence how he approached the synth.

In general, templates are for orchestral instruments which sound like, well, orchestral instruments. No need to reinvent the wheel - or viola - every time you need one (unless you’re into sound design stuff).

Synths - I don’t think anyone has synth patches in their template (do they?) I have blank instances so they’re all routed, that’s it.

yes, sort of, I have blank vst instances that are routed except some contain staple sounds such as sub base, a few pads, etc, around 30 vsts routed and ready to go, Then I fill l in the vsts slots as needed for the genre, the score. Orchestra is stagnant once set up so it does reside on the slave and awaits key switch commands.

Yes, but those blank instances are still part of a template…it’s a huge time saver.

Brian Eno: Can’t stand his music, but -many- of his ideas about ‘creativity’ are worth thinking about. And here’s one (for me anyhoo.) EVERY decent musical idea I have ever had has been as the result of a mistake that I then tweaked. Unless you FORCE yourself to change things up you’ll keep doing the same junk over and over. Which may be what you want. But creativity is mutation… which is by accident.

And so my emphasis is to make it as easy as possible to AVOID using templates. Do what you need to do to be able to do something really different every time out.

YMMV

—JC


I totally agree, but the term “template” is a vague term. For example, my templates include dozens of VI’s loaded into VEPro/Cubase (in addition to the pre-loaded “staple” patches) . The benefit is that all of those VI’s are already routed and assigned to their own tracks inside Cubase, all I need to do is select the patches. So I’ll have, for example, 16 blank instances of Omnisphere ready to go. If you’ve never used VEpro, it’s a huge time saver having them already loaded and routed.

Yes, absolutely.

There are of course templates and templates. I have one for orchestral stuff (which is what most people think of as templates in media circles anyway), but I have another that’s just blank instances of synths, plugins, etc, all routed correctly, sidechains set up (but turned off by default) all ready to go. I don’t see either of these as the enemy of creativity, quite the opposite - it frees you up from pure engineering chores which disrupt the creative flow.

So I think the Brian Eno discussion is a red herring really. These sorts of templates are something else entirely - it’s the equivalent to having kit plugged into the mixer and routed in the analogue domain rather than piled into a heap in the corner, nothing to do with synth presets etc. And if you have an orchestral template, then you have the LSO miced in the next room and brought into the 200 channel mixer too. What a wonderful world in which we live :slight_smile:

Hi All.

Back working on this issue. I eventually set up my 8DIO ADAGIO Strings Collection as trackpresets to try the modular idea I described in the initial post. It works OK. But I recently saw this video:

And became somewhat envious of the ease with which the composer is able to instantly choose articulations from his collection. Seems like a HUGE benefit to “the flow”. But it means having a huge template. I recently doubled my ram to 28GB, so I am hoping that having a larger template is possible and I’m back to trying to figure this out.

I came across a few resources that others may find helpful.

A PDF tutorial (quite extensive) by Tobias Escher on setting up an orchestral template with VEPro: Orchestral Templates - Tutorial

An interesting tidbit on the ThinkSpace forum about a potential limitation in Cubase that adds time to loading large templates: https://www.thinkspaceonline.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1741

A cool idea on organizing a large template in cubase over on the Soundsonline forum: EastWest Sounds

Anyway, back on it. If anyone has suggestions, they are welcome. Thanks.

Im trying to make that work as well in cubase… I have for example all articulations setup… But the returns for them all is making cubase choke… even with using VEPro. Though i only have the 1 master and one slave at the moment.
My resource meter is pegged pretty much at idle with no midi data… I wish there was a way i could eliminate the individual articulation outputs but still get that data out without using batch export which if i only had groups coming back to cubase i could only output at the group level… not the articulation level. if we had a way to select the midi tracks and have it export based on selection rather then based on ticking the boxes in the export batch dialog it might work… but as it stands id have to solo each track and use its group or stereo out to do the same thing if i kill all the articulation returns from VEPro

Hi,
I would consider working with VEPro, even on the same machine. It is really a great helper with huge templates.
The biggest orchestral template to date I’ve created for more or less testing purposes had over 3000 midi tracks plus sends, subgroups and groups. All hosted in VEPro and saved as a one big template with all the samples purged from Kontakt so the initial load time is much quicker and only the midi notes really played/used in a cue are loaded into RAM.
If I work on a smaller cue for TV and I don’t need all the available Percussion or every possible string articulation I can delete those tracks from the Cubase session and from the VEPro for even faster initial load. This is also a good way to create smaller templates originating from the big one.
Every group of midi tracks grouped by articulation for example (only short string articulations) or by libraries (only VSL stuff etc) can be saved in Cubase as Track Preset, same goes for VEPro (metaframes) and Kontakt (multis) and be used as a building blocks for creating new templates from scratch every time I don’t want/need to start with the very huge template.

You can also reffer to this thread for some more informations on this topic:

Cheers!

I am working with VEPro… and multiple machines. with 9 play plugins Full (9slots each (multitimbral) thats 162 audio returns per frame… and i have 10 frames worth.
it chokes

I am now making one with just the main instrument returns… i.e violas cellos french-horns etc. Instead of each and every articulation having its own audio return… Are you able to have each articulation audio return avail. without it using too many resources?

Hi cjadams,

not every midi track is routed to separate audio track. I use subgroups so all Violins 1 articulations go to Vln1 group etc. and all strings subgroups are routed to STRINGS group (sometimes splitted to Strgs Hi and Strgs Lo). Usually there is no problem with the playback since all samples are already in RAM (49GB here). One thing to be aware of is Autosave in Cubase - it can stop and freeze everything for few seconds while saving. Other than that everything is normal.
Cheers!

Ok… sounds similar… Im doing the instrument routing in VEPro which gives me all the Cellos/Violas/french horns etc. as audio returns. Then those point to Strings groups brass groups etc.
I left off in this template version… the one level deeper which was 18violins-Butter-legato-forte for example. which originally had its own audio return. I think that without 3 or so independent machines Things would not work so well. I still have that template saved. so no worries but this new lighter one without that one level lower just to the sections and instrument levels leaving off separate audio returns for the articulations seems to have done the trick. Must have been all the audio returns giving me trouble. Now its like 20 not 1000’s.
Though someday i will want enough hardware to make the master template with all articulation audio channels work.

Do you ever get asked for audio files down to the “articulation” level of specificity?
Or mostly to the level of violins violas etc. as separate wave files? That was the whole reason i originally tried to keep every single one separate… i could just check boxes off in the batch render dialog if needed. Now i won’t be able to do that… I can only go down so far as the instrument level.
Thoughts?

Of course it all depends on the client - very rarely on such a deep level though - but usually it is something I would rather have for mixing purposes AND sometimes months later I have to prepare another version for another cut or a DVD or something and I just need to get rid of the pizzicatis and some particular drum sounds so it is convenient to have all the audio files ready to go without the need of opening all the midis again. I also had to swap some string sounds not so long ago since new and better sounding library came along.
Cheers!

Ok… So i guess where i’m leaving it… is Master Template 1 = All levels down to Articulation (1000s of Audio Returns from VEPro) and Master-Lite Template 1= Down to only the Instrument level. I can do automation on each midi track in Nuendo so Thats not much of an issue it just means if i don’t have articulation level audio returns i can’t print those separately at the moment other then manually solo each export via their instrument group out. then rename it.
Kinda of pain but much lighter on the gear i have at the moment. The goal is to get 3 full machines other then my Main one that host the different Frames eventually. So i should be able to just toss gear the problem to get the Main Large Master full template running eventually.

Cool Thanks.

  • AT -

It seems that the main gripe with the “small” template (i.e, where you’re adding instrument tracks) is routing; As mentioned above, a violin track added to a project will still be routed to the default output rather than your custom “strings” group.

Has anyone found a workaround? Has anyone been able to auto-assign routings when adding a track preset?
This one lack of a feature is holding everyone back from embracing the small templates. Instead, it is forcing everyone to use huge, often cluttered templates

In Logic Pro, there are existing workarounds where you can save (for example) a strings track and its strings bus (so if you add it in to the blank project, it will join your other string bus). As for Cubase, i don’t understand why they neglected saving routing with Track Presets.