Use of various kinds of alternative templates

[acrawnsley]

I've recently been overhauling and re-organising my entire VI collection after acquiring a larger SSD. A useful exercise! I've had to give a lot of thought to how I use all forms of templates when working with OM.

 

It might be useful to collect various template use options together. By 'template', we could mean any of the following:

 

a) DAW or VI host templates

b) instrument-set and sound-set templates in OM

c) OM code templates

 

I'm interested to find out what other users are doing.

 

I think a) is well discussed in many contexts. There are hundreds of posts on VI Control forum about this and Stephane has also posted on the OM forum and shared examples and has a really helpful course on Composer Workshop too. I think for standard instrumentation (fixed orchestral or chamber ensembles) this is obviously a good option for most use cases.

 

However, as I develop my own OM workflow, I think that there are alternatives to the standard 'one big' DAW/host template approach when working with OM due to the flexibility on how one can define multiple instrument-sets and sound-sets. This is particularly the case when combining standard ensembles with other sound design considerations or when wanting to try non-standard groupings or to improvise. In those instances, I want more fluid interaction with both code and sound sources. 

 

I have been developing an approach using Reaper (DAW) template tracks and track groups -then further nested in templates for projects - linked to very flexible multiple  instrument-set/sound-set definitions/files that allow for iterative work 'on-the-fly'. This permits a really open-ended way of working while also having access to all the power of cc definitions, key switches linked to OMN articulations and so on. It's a work in progress but will share when the re-organisation is finished as it will likely cross-reference to other DAW/hosts. My other main sound-design/composition tools are Bitwig Studio and Usine HH and this template approach also works in those.

 

For c), what sorts of OM code templates are most useful and what are people commonly using, other than OM's built in template def-score templates?

 

best wishes

 

Andrew