Traction 7 - Inserting Plugins on Clips

[rwoodin3]

Hi, first post here.
   So, as a recent Cakewalk refugee, I use and really, mostly, like T7 so far, for the few days I have been using it. One thing that drew me to Traction was "clip level effects/clip level plugins". I thought, what a brilliant idea, insert multiple plugins, into multiple clips, on just one track. Hmmm, so after a couple maybe 20 hours of trying to make this work with 3rd party plugins, which included downloading Guide to T7 and reviewing Chapter 32 Clip effects (page 295), I figured I'd better join the forum and ask about how to do this because I am not having any luck on my own. 
   I'm not sure if it is possible to do what I'm trying to do with T7. I want to insert 3rd party vst synths into different (multiple) clips on one track. What I've been trying is to click on a track, insert input (Impact LX49+ keyboard), drag the red square with plus sign 'create new clip' from top right corner down to selected track, repeat drag and make another clip, record from keyboard into each clip or drag a different wav file into each clip, Clicking the FX on top of clip bar only allows to add T7 built in plugins, so as workaround, I then drag the grey square with plus sign 'new plugin generator' onto each clip and then it does allow me to insert different 3rd party plugins. I inserted TyrellN6 analog synth in first clip and Dropzone wave synth in second clip. Then I have to select the plugin in the first clip, right click and select 'wrap this plugin in a new rack plugin', hover over and click on the 'wrapper' in the clip, click on either of the outer plus signs (outside the red square) and say 'add to track' and then add it to the track I'm on. That then enables my to hear the keyboard being played and also, it places the (copy of?) the plugin that's in the wrapper that's in the clip, just ahead of volume/pan mixer for that track. Now I can record some notes into this first clip from the keyboard and then playback through clip and hear the recording play. Now...when I try to repeat this (maybe a little convoluted ) procedure on the second clip, I can get no recording or output on the track. I would like to find some way to make multiple instances of different synths (or even the same synth with different preset) all on a single track, work. Am I wasting my time? Is there an alternate way I'm unaware of to do this? Do I just have to use individual tracks for synth or other 3rd party plugins, which is what I was doing in cakewalk? 

Hoping someone with experience can help on this. Thanks Kindly and hope this all makes some sense.
   

[chico.co.uk]

Okay, a few pointers;

1) You don't need to insert a new clip, before recording audio (or midi) to a track. Just assign an interface to the track, arm it, hit R for record, and you're done.

2) Drag the grey square, like you described, onto an audio track, to assign that synth/effect/whatever, to that audio track. Don't then wrap it in a rack. Just double click it, to open the plugin gui, and assign whatever parameters/presets etc you want, in that synth

3) Repeat for other audio clips.

4) You're done.

[chico.co.uk]

...

[pough]

Hi, first post here.

Welcome!

I want to insert 3rd party vst synths into different (multiple) clips on one track.

Huh... That's not something I ever imagined anyone would want to do and if I'm not mistaken it's not possible. I believe the idea for clip-level plugins is effect plugins added to audio clips. A MIDI clip has no sound coming out of it so there's no effect. I just made an edit to test and I can add plugins to audio clips but not MIDI clips.

It sounds to me like you're wanting to do something that FL Studio might be more capable of. It has an arrangement window with clips that don't have a necessary audio-track relationship with the rows they're placed in. Tracktion's rows have a left-to-right audio/MIDI flow that I don't think will let you do clip-level synths.

If you want to add multiple synths to one track, that's possible with a rack, but it has to be added into the right-hand "mixer panel" in the usual way.

I hope that helps!

[chico.co.uk]

Yeah, probably what pough said actually. I missed the names of the plugins being added, and skim read something about dragging a wav file, then adding a plugin to that.

You can drop plugins onto audio clips, but not midi clips. So you could drop Amplitude onto a wave file, or something that takes an audio in, and outputs audio, but you can't drop a synth that expects midi input onto a midi clip.

What's the idea with multiple different clips on one track anyway, what are you trying to do, that you can't have them on their own track?

[klangbastler]

edit: sorry, had not read thoroughly through the other posts, things were already mentioned ...

when i understand you correctly: you want to use virtual instruments with the clip-effect feature. that's not possible. there are two ways for clip-effects in t7, one is the button on the clip-bar, where you found the tracktion-builtin-effects, that is relatively new as a feature.
the other is to drag effects onto clips, which to my knowledge works only for audiofiles (or audioclips) not for midi-clips.

as already mentioned, midi gets recorded on the tracklevel via choosing the keyboard as input. no need to put a clip on the track first, it will be automatically generated while recording.

there are lots of ways to organize signalflow in tracktion via tracks and racks, but it may require some learning to get familiar with it.

[klangbastler]

by the way, there is a feature with stepclips, that let you route different "lines" of a stepclip to different synths on the same track.
that's probably a little bit in the direction you are asking for ...
here is a tutorial video for t6 from bill edstrom describing the feature (i hope it is still there in t7, didn't check for it):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLnhV9 ... RAjWpUKOrs

it automatically does what was proposed with racks before, may help to understand that a little better.

[rwoodin3]

Thanks so much for all this information! The main reason for placing different synths and effects into different clips on one track is to save space and not have to use a high number of like say, 100 tracks. For example, I have synths with hundreds of presets and I could envision having dozens of tracks with the same synth on the 'output' (just to the left of the mixer), with each instance having a different preset, just to use a 30 second clip or two with that preset in that track.

Your responses help me to be aware that I need to get a better grasp of midi vs audio and which plugins have one or both of these signal types as input and output. I really appreciate any information so, thanks!

Are there any synths that use audio for input/output?

As a little more context for my original thoughts of clip level VST synths and effects, I've been a (mediocre) guitar player for ages. I enjoy taking lessons and playing electric guitar. Recently, over the past year or so, I started listening to electronic compositions on youtube, mostly to de-stress in the evening. I became really inspired by this new (to me) type of music and the fact that at 58 years old, I could really get into enjoying a whole new genre of music. Specifically, there is a person on youtube by the name of 'Epicuros' and they have compiled many different electronic music songs from many different artists such as 01-N - Homeobox, Ascendant - InStasis and so on into videos that are an hour or more in length. The 'mix' by Epicuros I like the best is called 'Interstellar'.
I really like those songs and the way Epicuros has mixed them. I've been using cakewalk (currently SONAR professional) forever (since 2005) so I bought a 49 key controller Nektar Impact LX49+ and I started trying out different synths and romplers with that. What I found is cakewalk crashes more than I like, although I know that could be due to many different reasons. Nevertheless I decided to try some different DAW's that I thought may be more stable. Along with that, I began thinking about how many different sounds are used in making this 'space synth-trance' music. That's the long, long version of how I found my way to this and posed the questions I did. As a postcsript: I've been off work due to a foot injury and have had the extra time to spend learning some basic knowledge of synths - analog, frequency, hybrid. It's been very interesting. My entire goal is to use the software synths with DAW's to get ideas from my mind, transferred into recordings on my PC. I suppose that's what it's all about. Thanks again and any other tips and info on this is always appreciated.

Lets try one more time to post a NON-SPAM link that shows exactly what music I'm talking about

[rwoodin3]

inadvertent repost

[chico.co.uk]

Okay, some other things you might want to consider / look into ;

If you have hundreds of tracks, each with a synth on them, or audio clips, with synths / effects dragged onto them, to manipulate sound, that's probably going to murder the cpu and memory use on your machine. You're effectively running multiple independant instances of a synth, each of which needs it's own slice of cpu and memory. To make that more manageable, for the hardware, you're probably going to want to bounce those clips / tracks down to audio, as you go, because playing back audio clips, is a lot less taxing for the cpu and memory.

With that in mind, Waveform lets you freeze tracks, or freeze part of tracks (using the freeze point plugin, wherever you drop that, maybe before the volume and pan plugin on the track). That temporarily frees up the CPU and memory used by the plugins, before the freeze point, because the track is bounced to audio. You can unfreeze later, if you need to tweak the synth. So look into that, to keep your resource use under control. Here's a vid for an old version of Tracktion;



You've got unlimited tracks, so if you're doing the above, you can insert as many duplicate synths on as many tracks as you like, just freeze tracks as your machine gets under too much load, unfreeze the tracks if you want to tweak the settings on the synth later.

In terms of that getting messy, with loads of tracks in the edit, you can hide tracks from view, and tag tracks so you know which are "synths" or "guitars", or whatever, so you can group together tracks you think of as similar. ;



You can also drop "similar" tracks into folders, and fold them away, if that helps organise what you see on screen better. You could put all the tracks that use the same synth in one folder, for instance, or all the ones that you want to mix generally together, eg, if you want the volume on a bunch of tracks to go up or down at certain points, drop them in a folder, and move the volume and pan on the folder to change all of the tracks in the folder at the same time. Submix tracks are similar to Folder tracks, the difference being you can apply plugins to the whole submix too, whereas you can't apply plugins to submixes. This vid explains the differences;



Finally, the browser on the left, the Tracks tab, lets you "hide" tracks, when you're not interested in mixing them, on screen, but they still play, or disable tracks, if you don't want to hear them, and want to reclaim the resources being used by them (cpu/memory etc)

Personally i probably wouldn't drop synths on audio clips, if i were you, i'd start with a track for each sound, even if it seems overkill, and use the features to hide tracks and group tracks in folders you can fold away, to organise the screen space better, so you can still see the bit you're currently working on. There's no resource impact of having a load of tracks, so you might as well. But it's all what works best for you, really

[rwoodin3]

Excellent info. I plan on doing some work with these suggestions this weekend. Thanks!