Hey,

first off sorry if it's not the right subforum. And I'm pretty damn sure this question has been asked and answered before, but it's not easy when you're a newbie and English is not your first language to figure the right keywords. I did try a few combinations before making this thead but no luck.

I think this is a somewhat DAW/VST agnostic question but for reference I am using Live as DAW and Evolution songwriter (loaded in Kontakt 6) as VST.

I've been playing with Evolution built-in strumming patterns and trying to record them as they're playing in my DAW. And of course, all Ableton is only recording is the actual key press on my MIDI keyword, not the strumming.

After quite a bit of time looking at different solutions (weirdly enough, although this question has been asked on dedicated VST forums, no one answered it in a way that makes sense), I figured that I can re-route the signal from the VST Midi track in Live to an Audio track and record it, however I am left with an Audio clip and I'd much rather have a Midi clip to play with...

At some point the VST developper mentioned that in Kontakt you can go to Options/Engine/Send midi to outside world and select Script generated notes to get your Daw to record the strumming happening internally in the VST, but that did not work for me.

What are you guys doing in this case? I'm pretty sure there's got to be a better option than working with audio clip as I'm doing right now.

 

Last edited: Jun 8, 2022

It's actually an interesting question.

I thought about this option too but I'm pretty sure you can make a script in a way that can't be exported. Kind of "all the MIDI stuff happens inside"
Sounds hard because there's quite a lot of lines of KSP code in this lib. Also probably the notes aren't stored in midi format. It may be impossible unless you become a KSP. expert.

 

Hey, thanks for the answer. I actually made some progress! I figured that maybe if I used a virtual midi driver between Kontakt and my DAW, it might just work... and it did!

Here's what I did : I booted Kontakt separately from my DAW (not as a plugin) and in Options/MIDI/Output set Ethernet MIDI on (that's what my MIDI vritual driver is recognized as in both my DAW and Kontakt. I use a free one called LoopBe1 at the moment)



Then in my Live I selected a MIDI track and set its entry type as Ethernet MIDI (but I think "All Ins" would work too).
I then loaded a random guitar sound in the track.

Then when I hit record and pressed the key assigned to my VSTs strumming pattern, it actually generated AND recorded Midi data...!

Now, it's not 100% clean, but it IS easily cleanable and usable. Check it out in the piano roll :




Now I was just mashing random keys because I'm in bed with a crappy laptop and got nothing to play proper chords, but we can see here that the rythmic pattern generated by the VST is definitely present, a little bit of editing in the piano roll and I have something I can use as a base or as is

I'll post again if I figure a cleaner workflow because it still feels like a dirty hack, but it's better for my use case than ending up with audio clips, that is more of a destructive workflow.

 

I've experimented again today with proper gear, and it's not really working. There are a lot of parasite notes that can be cleaned relateively easily, but the real issue is that recording this way the strumming tempo is NOT in synch with your DAW. So you have to figure what the original tempo is, set up your DAW to that tempo and then record. Then you can quantize, etc. Not really worth the effort...

 

I would get a cheap electric guitar + cheap audio interface. You can learn some basic chords and strumming patterns in a few weeks. It will sound better than any sample library and with the right plugins, you can make an electric almost sound like an acoustic. Virtual guitars will always sound fake to a degree, no matter how good the library is.

 

I don't know if it can help, in the link below he's talking about how to record midi notes generated by Noire particle engine in Kontakt to another instrument track.
https://musicalsanctuary.com/how-to-use-noires-particle-engine-with-other-instruments/

 

I guess your idea is to use those patterns with other vst, right?
Do you know that you can do strumming with midi plugins?
Scaler for example has that possibility.

 

I actually can play the guitar a bit, but having access to a bunch of patterns to use and re-use with other VSTs seemed like a faster route than strumming myself. As for guitar VST sounding fake, for accoustic, I tend to agree, but as soon as we're adding distortion then imho it sounds quite decent.

Thanks, I'll check that out!

Yes, it's exactly what I am after. And no, I did not know ^^; I've been studying music composition academically for a couple of years now but I'm only starting now to look at the production side of things. Thanks for the pointer, I'm going to be all over it

EDIT: Duuuude, that tool looks so awesome, thanks a metric ton for sharing...! Strumming and midi export looks awesome but on top of that it looks great for someone with a bit of music theory knowledge, definitely my alley

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2022

"Duuuude, that tool looks so awesome, thanks a metric ton for sharing...! Strumming and midi export looks awesome but on top of that it looks great for someone with a bit of music theory knowledge, definitely my alley"

Great!
Another Midi fx that also does strumming is Chord prism

 

I see now what you actually wanted but didn't know it exists. Interesting thread anyways, enjoy ;)

 

Yeah I saw it listed on the same online store, looks a bit less user friendly so I'm grateful for the tutorial. I'm going to give it a shot too, from user comments it seems it has some different features compared to Scaler

Thank you! Also big up for Devin Townsend ^^;

 

Yeah! That totally worked, no garbled notes or tempo problem anymore. Thanks a lot brother!!!! One thing though, it's "Script generated notes" that needs to be checked, if I check Incoming notes, then nothing else that the strumming keyswitch is recorded (in my case that C0).

In Live it's as easy as selecting the input type and input channel in the dedicated drop-downs. In the screen below I've highlighted those in yellow, the source track where I loaded Kontakt and the strumming VST is the purple one, the second Midi track where I record eveything that happens is the red one. Obviously not posting this for you but for future searches by newbies like me.



Edit: so it's not working PERFECTLY, but it's good enough. It's strange but for instance I've tried recording a basic strumming of a basic F major chord on a 6 strings guitar. It's a basic voicing, so there are 6 notes involved, F1, C2, F2, A2, C3 and F3. But for some strange reason apart from these 6 notes the DAW also recorded C0 (expected, that's the strumming keywitch), E1, D2, A1, D2, G2 B2 and E3...!

It's not a lot of work to figure which notes are not part of the chord or riff and edit them out, so I'm still happy with the result, but I'm curious why this is happening.

 

Last edited: Jun 10, 2022