User manual

Table Of Contents
255
VST instruments and instrument tracks
Instrument tracks
The On/Off button is used to activate or deactivate the VST instrument.
When an instrument is selected from the instrument pop-up menu, it is activated
automatically, i.
e. the On/Off button is lit.
For some instruments you may also bypass the instrument by clicking the Bypass
button to the right of the On/Off button.
Click the Edit (“e”) button to open the control panel for the VST instrument.
Below the Edit button is a small LED that will light up when MIDI data is received
by the instrument.
The rightmost button allows you to activate the desired output for the instrument.
This is useful when you are using VST instruments that have a large number of
audio busses, which may be confusing. Click one of the entries in the pop-up list
to activate/deactivate output busses for this instrument.
Instrument tracks
An instrument track is a combination of a VST instrument, a MIDI track, and a VST
instrument channel, in other words: it is a track coupled with a sound – it allows you to
think in terms of sounds rather than in terms of track and instrument settings.
Adding instrument tracks
To open and use an instrument track, proceed as follows:
1. Open the Project menu, open the Add Track submenu and select “Instrument”.
You can also right-click the track list and select “Add Instrument Track” on the
context menu.
2. The Add Instrument Track dialog opens.
You can select an instrument for the track from the pop-up menu (but you can also
leave this until later if you wish). Specify the number of instrument tracks you wish
to create in the “Count” field. If you click the Browse button, the dialog expands to
show the Presets browser, where you can browse for sounds, see
“Using the
Presets browser” on page 261.
3. Click the Add Track button.
If you have selected an instrument in the Add Track dialog, the new track gets the
name of the instrument. Otherwise, the track is named “Instrument track”.
Properties
Each instrument track has a corresponding channel in the MixConsole.
In the Inspector, you can select a VST instrument from the Instrument pop-up
menu.
When you select an instrument from this pop-up menu, its control panel will open
automatically.
You can also exchange the “sound” of an instrument track (i. e. the VST instrument
and its settings) by extracting these data from another instrument track or a VST
preset, see
“Extracting sound from an instrument track or VST preset” on page
426.
On the Input Routing pop-up menu, you can select a MIDI input.
Instrument tracks have only one MIDI input.