Would it be possible to host VST plugins directly inside Sensory Percussion? Being able to use something like Valhalla reverbs or Soundtoys effects in real time, within the software’s own low-latency engine, would be an incredible tool for live sound design.
I have no idea how complex this would be to implement from a development standpoint, but MuseScore has managed to do it outside of a traditional DAW context, which gives me hope that it’s not entirely out of reach.
For those of us using Sensory Percussion as a standalone performance instrument, this would be a real game-changer.
Man, that would be cool. The way I’ve done it in Logic is utilizing Loopback to monitor and capture audio, and using a virtual MIDI bus to send CC out of SP, into Logic, and MIDI-learning parameters of third-party plugins. If you’re in Ableton, I’m sure it’s a lot better since Live has native support for the plugin.
Your suggestion would be a game-changer. I can only assume that it would be pretty hard to do on the FX slots in layers, since those can have such complex routings inside sequencers/groups/all the nesting options, but maybe on a bus level it would be feasible?
What’s up friends! Tbh I’m not a developer so I also don’t truly know how complex it would be to host 3rd party VSTs inside of Sensory Percussion, but we can all agree it would be cool! Lol. It has come up in discussions before, and we’ll certainly take note of the interest here in the forum.
I imagine hosting VSTs that act like effects might be somewhat straightforward and would make sense inside of either of a layer or set-level fx panel in Sensory Percussion, but other instrument VSTs act more like generator modules, so we’d probably need to make a distinction between the two kinds and have a different interface for each. And then some VSTs, like ours for example, have their own set of audio inputs + outputs, so what happens you load the Sensory Percussion VST inside of the standalone Sensory Percussion app? A lot to think through!
While we don’t have news on this specific fx-related front, we do have multiple new in-house fx in the works, a couple of which are pretty close to being finished and added to Sensory Percussion 2 Beta. So keep an eye out for that!
And like @Joris_Hoogsteder mentioned, you can get a lot of mileage out of mapping MIDI from Sensory Percussion to parameters inside of 3rd party VSTs, but it does require having a DAW open. In Ableton, adding parameters to this “configure” window and then mapping CC knobs from Sensory Percussion is super fun.
btw @Joris_Hoogsteder if you were using Loopback to record the output of Sensory Percussion, you might be able to eliminate it from your workflow now with the built-in recording feature. I’ve always found Loopback a little unwieldy.
Your Ableton example is clean! One day I’ll get fast and comfortable producing in Ableton. I’ll kick myself for not having switched earlier.
I’ve been using the built-in recorder and it’s AWESOME! In the sense of OP’s question, that wouldn’t work, though, would it? Ex. If you wanted to influence the parameters of, say, Echoboy with MIDI cc and have those Echoboy FX applied to the SP signal, one would still need a way to get that live SP audio stream into the DAW. I agree that loopback can be finicky and sometimes creates a weird latency.
I bet the SP plugin in Ableton mitigates all this.
Gotcha, sorry I totally misread your previous message. Yeah, to get the audio from Sensory into your DAW, you could use any of several recordings methods depending on the DAW, physical setup, etc.
One quick-and-dirty method if you’re ok with just having two channels Sensory Percussion output is a physical loopback, connecting 1/4” audio cables from the main outs on back of the EVANS Portal back into the two combo jacks on the front. No virtual routing software or extra interface needed in that case, and you can run the audio from Sensory directly through whatever VSTs you have going in your DAW in realtime.
