This piece was written purely as a way to help me get to grips with a completely new music production workflow. With a new Komplete Kontrol S61 (which is fantastic) comes the need for a more MIDI-aware DAW; I’m trialling Cockos Reaper as it seems to be feature rich and reasonably priced. I don’t imagine I’ll leave OpenMPT entirely — I’ve been using it for over a decade now, and it’s ingrained in my muscle memory.
I’m still struggling with getting routing working the way I want in Reaper. It’s really easy to create 16 MIDI channels for a VSTi like Kontakt, and easy to map plugin outputs to separate outputs, but I can’t for the life of me work out how to have a MIDI input track also function as one of the outputs. I want to do this so that I can set up an output for each instrument in Kontakt, allowing me to use a single Kontakt instance to save on RAM and CPU cycles, and not have a thousand-and-three tracks to manage. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!
This piece is performed “live” — the MIDI events for the drums, guitar, piano, bass, and strings are all recorded directly from the Kontrol (and tweaked slightly); I’m trying to find the best way of rapidly getting music down. It’s made a little more complex by the fact that I don’t have the world’s largest desk, so using the keyboard and mouse is now somewhat uncomfortable.
You can grab and listen to it on Soundcloud, or use the embedded player and download links below.
Waltz in C Minor by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
If you’re interested in using any of my music in your games, videos, or other multimedia productions, let me know!
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