VST Key Switches

[EduW]

Glad that I found this forum.

I'm working with a VST instrument that supports articulation switching (like Spitfire or VSL), and I’ve set up some Sound Variations in Studio One. I can manually switch articulations using the editor, but I’d really like to trigger them live via MIDI - preferably with keyswitches or some kind of controller.

Is there a way to assign Sound Variations to specific MIDI notes or CC messages so I can control them in real-time while recording? I checked the mapping, but I’m not entirely sure how to link it to my MIDI keyboard.

Any help or example setups would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Ed

 

[Lukas]

Welcome to the forum!

There are different ways to do this. If you use Vienna Synchron Player, it should automatically send Sound Variation data to Studio One. Spitfire's player has experimental support for this (afaik only in the VST2 version).

Once you have the Sound Variation maps in Studio One, you can switch between these variations...

- via keyswitches (if enabled in the Sound Variation Editor and if you have input keyswitches for the variations)
- via keyboard shortcuts
- via buttons in the Macro Toolbar
- via macros in Studio One Remote

What I did in my Sound Variation showcase videos for PreSonus is I assigned the "Apply Variation 1-8" commands to buttons on my Axiom Pro MIDI keyboard and additionally "Next Variation" / "Previous Variation" to two more buttons. This allows me to access all the Sound Variations from my MIDI controller buttons. (For this to work, your MIDI controller needs to be able to send MIDI CC messages from buttons or pads.)

You can see this in action in this video:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

This is actually my favorite approach until now because every sample library has their own mappings and its own set of articulations (for example, some libraries offer different shorts variations whereas others have multiple legato types like Cinematic Studio Strings or OT Berlin Strings). But having buttons/shortcuts/Studio One Remote commands for specific articulations (tremolo, legato, spiccato etc.) works just as well.

Here's a video that shows how you can create the Sound Variation maps:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

And in this video, I show how to create macros to access the variations via macros and key commands:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

I hope that helps!

 

[Lukas]

These are the commands that you can use to switch articulations:

 

[EduW]

Lucas - thanks for taking the time and thanks a lot for the detailed explanation! That really helped clear things up.

I didn’t know you could assign "Apply Variation" commands to MIDI controller buttons. I’m using a Launchkey Mini, and I think it should be able to send CCs from the pads, so I’ll give that a try.

Also, I’ll definitely check out those videos you mentioned. Thanks again for sharing them!