FN Synth and Analog Synth won't hold instrument selection

[BuPhilOh]

As you can tell from these questions, I'm new to DAWs and new to MIDI. I have three questions. I hope the answers are easy for you more experienced people to provide.

I'm using T6 on Win 10.
I've unlocked these 2 synths from demo mode.

1) I have a track with a midi clip on it. I add either of these synth plugins just right of the volume/pan filter (because if I drag them to the left as described in Bill Edstrom's book I still have the error about "... doesn't output to a MIDI device or a plugin synthesiser.", and no sound). When I click "Play" in the transport block I hear the notes through "5th Sweep PAD" (Analog) or "Bright Electric Piano" (FM) instruments because those instruments are at the top of the respective lists. When I return to the top of the track and select a different instrument in the plugin's panel I see it displayed in the field, but as soon as I click "Play" in the T6 transport block the plugin switches back to the original instrument. What am I doing wrong?

2) I'm looking for a way to generate boring old instrument sounds like piano, organ, percussion, etc from my midi tracks in T6. These 2 synths don't do that as far as I can tell. What do I need to look for? A VST or VSTi plugin synth? Or some other kind of MIDI object?

I'd also appreciate links to good, basic resources that explain what the different MIDI objects do and how they interact.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[jabe]

Your synth plug-in really does want to be to the left of the volume/pad thingy, so something else is probably amiss. It might be worth your while getting one or some of the demo songs from the Tracktion website.

[PapaLazarou]

As you can tell from these questions, I'm new to DAWs and new to MIDI. I have three questions. I hope the answers are easy for you more experienced people to provide.

I'm using T6 on Win 10.
I've unlocked these 2 synths from demo mode.

1) I have a track with a midi clip on it. I add either of these synth plugins just right of the volume/pan filter (because if I drag them to the left as described in Bill Edstrom's book I still have the error about "... doesn't output to a MIDI device or a plugin synthesiser.", and no sound).

Hi, I'm pretty new to this too, but learning I just drag them to the left of the volume control, wait for the area to glow red and drop it there. Works fine. Looks something like this once synth plugins added:

When I click "Play" in the transport block I hear the notes through "5th Sweep PAD" (Analog) or "Bright Electric Piano" (FM) instruments because those instruments are at the top of the respective lists. When I return to the top of the track and select a different instrument in the plugin's panel I see it displayed in the field, but as soon as I click "Play" in the T6 transport block the plugin switches back to the original instrument. What am I doing wrong?

This sounds like the MIDI track has a program change message in it, that is instructing the synth to switch to a certain preset. You can strip these out by clicking on the MIDI track to select it and choosing "Insert Program Change" and "Remove all program-change messages from this clip". Alternatively you can just insert a program change for the instrument you want to use.

2) I'm looking for a way to generate boring old instrument sounds like piano, organ, percussion, etc from my midi tracks in T6. These 2 synths don't do that as far as I can tell. What do I need to look for? A VST or VSTi plugin synth? Or some other kind of MIDI object?

There's literally endless ways you can do this. However, to get you started without having to buy anything, I would suggest getting a SoundFont player VST and downloading a General MIDI soundfont. General MIDI means it contains all the GM standard instruments and a SoundFont is basically a bunch of sound samples bundled together into one file.

Tracktion doesn't come with a SoundFont player, but of the ones I've tried, I have found TX16Wx the best. It's probably not the simplest to use and it can do a fair bit more than just play soundfont's, but I've had issues with most of the other free SF players I've tried, while this one has worked flawlessly.

For a soundfont, a good all rounder is Fluid_R3 which is fully open source and for the most part, gives pretty reasonable results. One place this can be downloaded is here - https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfont (use 7zip or similar to uncompress).

[BuPhilOh]

Thank you, jabe, I tried again and it worked this time. Being pretty new to T6 I may have just had the focus in the wrong track or something.

Thank you, papalazarou. You were right about the program change message. I think it inserted the first instrument in the list as the program when I added the plugin, and I didn't know enough to look for that. But your very clear answer pointed me to the problem, so I was able to set a program for the entire clip and make it stick. I also downloaded TX16Wx and Fluid_R3 and after fiddling with 7-zip and T6 for a bit I was able to get that combination to work just the way I want it to. For my first (next) few tiny projects I think I'll be using that combination most of the time. When I want different sounds I'll look for a different soundbank, I guess.

Thanks, again!