First of all, as I’ve said before, thanks so much for providing SP. Such an amazing tool to work with!
Now, I have no idea how feasible this would be to achieve but…
In the VST plugin version, it would be really useful to be able to route more outputs in order to have more control and seperation in the DAW. At the moment you can have the audio from each drum, plus the 2 sends and the master, routed to their own tracks in Ableton. It would be really helpful to get even more seperation in the audio coming from each drum if possible. E.g Center, Edge, Rimclick etc all routed individually to seperate tracks in ableton. Or ideally to go a step further and allow every single sampler in SP to be able to be routed to its own track in Ableton. E.g On the center zone of a drum you might have two or three samplers, so each of them could be routed to a different output channel. I’m not sure what the limitations are for the number of outputs a VST plugin can have, but I believe Kontakt can have upto 64 outputs.
This would allow much more seperation in the stems which is really helpful when working with other producers/mixers who don’t own the Sensory Percussion software and would need to be working with audio stems. They always need to be able to have the most control when mixing the different elements and in most cases just sending them the 4 drum channels plus sends is not enough seperation. The only work around for this at the moment is, once recorded, to bounce multiple times on to new tracks in ableton but muting samplers in the sensory percussion VST which is time consuming.
Having the multiple outputs in the SP plugin and therefore multiple tracks ableton would also allow much more creative possibilities when using ableton FX plugins with Sensory Percussion.
Just a thought, but could be a really useful upgrade to the VST. Thanks!
Nick
I’m struggling with this exact issue currently. Please, Sunhouse, make an update with this! It makes such a difference in both recording and playing live inside of Ableton.
Hi guys, thanks for your messages. Just to be clear, are you talking about Sensory Percussion v1 or v2 here?
With the plugins, we’re really butting up against the limitations of what the DAW allows. Ableton only allows 16 outputs from a single channel, so that’s what we’re limited to. Other DAWs might allow more, but the plugin doesn’t work in most other DAWs because of the limitation of the number of INPUT channels into the plugin. Most DAWs like Logic only allow stereo input into a plugin.
For SPv1, we’re even more limited because you can’t break apart pads and sounds on the drum channel. We’re stuck with the entire drum channel and everything on it being mixed down to stereo. We completely restructured this in V2 with Layers and Submixes. So you can really go wild in V2 in this respect.
But if you want to go so granular to record at the pad or even sampler level, there are tradeoffs. If you record at that level, the output would be PRE any effects further up the chain. So a lot of the magic of controlling effects with your playing wouldn’t be captured. Like a lot of our presets use effects at the Layer level.
We currently limit Submixes to 16 – we could look into increasing this if there’s really demand for it. You could use all these outputs with our built-in recording feature.
Thanks for the info. Would another avenue be to make the recording section more DAW like then, or integrate the use of 3rd party VST effects within the standalone app? At the moment, getting SP to sound as good as possible is doable, but not ideal within Ableton.
Yeah, there’s definitely tradeoffs here. My recommendation would be to organize your set in Sensory Percussion so that each layer will be routed to a submix. Think of each layer as a musical element you want separated in the mix. Get each layer as mixed and good-sounding as you can within SP then add finishing effects and mastering within Ableton.
I guess it would help to better understand what your sets are looking like. Is it all acoustic presets? Melodic and other stuff? How many layers are building?