Website: Hauptwerk VSTi - Sonar - Pristine Space Tutorial...

[micdev]

For those who followed my experiments lately with Hw Vsti in a 64 bit environment you should immediatly go to http://www.contrebombarde.com/concerthall/music/402 and listen to the wonderful sound using Pristine Space (of course a talented organist help a lot, thanks Antonio!)

The solution involves Sonar, Pristine Space, Hauptwerk VSTi and some impulse responses. This is not as simple as clicking the Hauptwerk Stand-alone icon and I do understand that many of you are not sure to have the technical expertise and time to try to setup something like that.

To help those interested in trying this solution, I built a little website that explains the best I could how to setup and configure everything.

I'm still learning a lot about those softwares and my explainations are, I'm sure not the only way to do it.

Being french Canadian, my English is like my organ playing.... ;-) Rob Stefanussen (contrebombarde.com) offered his help to review my writing. So what your're about to see-read is a beta version (only the first page have been reviewed and corrected. So forgive my writing....

You can access the website at:

http://www.hauptwerkconsultant.com/hw/intro.asp

Hope this will help a few of you jump into the "64 bit convolution reverb bandwagon"

Btw, a few minutes ago I received an email from Cakewalk offering me to upgrade my Sonar 7 Studio Edition (paid $149) to Producer Edition for $99 (include the little brother of Pristine Space and some plug-in for Surround processing.... humm might be interesting).

So have a look..... and let me know what you think!

Regards
François

[Jim Reid]

Oh my, such a packed post of information by Francois!

I have had a look at his instructions for use of
Sonar 7+Pristine Space+Hauptwerk VSTi and some
impulse responses... Seems quite elaborate, but
from his demo, it works!

Now I can see why Martin has taken/is taking so long
to do the "built-ins" needed to include all, or similar,
directly into the HW application. And Martin seems to
offer no immediate news about a near time release,
maybe within the next 12 months or so?

Also, it is costly. Somewhere Francois was able to buy
Sonar 7 for $149 plus $120 or so for the cost
of Pristine Space (which I understand is an upgrade
from the included "plug-in" (if that is what it is called)
included in the basic Sonar Studio edition. I find Sonar 7
priced around $300, or more, at various places.

Would really like to have convoled reverb for my VTPO,
but that seems a bit steep, plus I am not sure I follow
all of the instructions given by Francois (I did spend
a good amount of time reading his beta pages this
afternoon).

Will probably just stay with my basic Lexicon MPX-110
for VTPO playing for the time being.

Will need neither Pristine Space nor the Lexicon
for the coming Heinz Kampen organ from Brett, nor the
present "wet" Zwolle I now have from Jiri, with which
I am practicing my Bach pieces which I am working on
to relearn. Of course the Metz C-C organ is also wet for
use with what little practice I put into the Giguot Scherzo!

[fantapavela]

François, what a marvellous set of information you provided!!! Thank you very much! And thanks also to Rob for revision!!! You are great!! :-)

Très bien fait! Merci!

[micdev]

Thanks all,

Don't let the lenght of the tutorial freighten you, if is rather easy to setup and with a little experience you will be able to create your own virtual room.

About Sonar at $149, go to store.cakewalk.com, select SONAR (left had side), the select SONAR Studio competitive upgrade ($199), complete the form (link just over the cart. Most audio cart comes with a program, most of them are eligible for upgrade), this will give you an additionnal $50 discount.

Let me know if you need more infos.

François

[Geoff Lloyd]

Hello Francois,

Thanks for your helpful tutorials.

I've spent a bit of time today setting up Sonar for my 64-bit system (I'm using SIR2 rather than Voxengo, and Sonar 6 rather than 7, but apart from both being less expensive than what you're using I think the functionality is much the same).

I wanted to replicate with a dry/reverb set-up the multi-channel system I use for the wet sets. That's worked up to a point, but the biggest drawback is that Sonar/ Hauptwerk VSTi will only load stereo samples, not mono. As a result, I think I'm going to go back to my previous Reaper based reverb solution, and see if I can get rid of the glitches I was experiencing in that. From my point of view, having to load the organ in stereo is a big step backwards from the mono multi-channel setup you can have in either the Standalone or Midi Sequencer versions, given that these allow you to hear individual pipes from alternate sides just as you would when playing a pipe organ.

Incidentally, I found I had to install midi tracks in Sonar for each of my console manuals, as well as audio tracks, to get this to work, though it wasn't difficult to do that.

Best regards, and thanks again for your step by step instructions.

Geoff

[micdev]

Hello Geoff,

Interesting to know that Hw VSTi won't load mono... I will try it on my system (Sonar 7 instead of 6...) Is Martin have any solution or recommandation regarding that problem?


I'll let you know my finding... if I find something ;-)

François

[micdev]

Geoff,

I tried to load an organ, all ther ranks at 24 bit/mono... and it is working. When you say that Hw VSTi can't load mono samples, do you get an error message while loading the organ?

Ohoh... unless your audio outputs are configured mono... I'll have to test that tomorrow.

Thanks for clarifiing.

[Stefanussen]

After taking a good look at Francois' work, I have to say I'm very impressed. He's given us quite a treat, and I think just about anyone, regardless of tech savvy would be able to get reverb working using this thorough tutorial.

Thanks, Francois!

[Geoff Lloyd]

Hello François,

I tried to load an organ, all ther ranks at 24 bit/mono... and it is working. When you say that Hw VSTi can't load mono samples, do you get an error message while loading the organ?

Ohoh... unless your audio outputs are configured mono... I'll have to test that tomorrow.

Thanks for clarifiing.

You're right - it's HW mono audio outputs rather than mono samples which don't work in VSTi, sorry if what I said before was confusing.

Martin commented on this in reply to another post as follows:

I can see the problem: the last thing you did before it stopped working was to restore a backup of your stand-alone settings into the VSTi configuration. That backup had some audio outputs configured to use mono output, which isn't supported in the VSTi configuration (because VSTi plug-ins have to have a fixed pre-determined channel format for all outputs; stereo for all outputs in Hauptwerk's case). Hence the Hauptwerk VSTi is unable to launch because the channel format (mono) isn't compatible with the VSTi version.

I'll log that as a bug because it's an (albeit unusual) case that Hauptwerk or its backup/restore mechanism would need to detect specifically and migrate to some appropriate defaults.

Best regards,

Geoff

[mdyde]

Hello Geoff/François,

That's correct - it's a restriction of the VST architecture, rather than Hauptwerk specifically (a plug-in must be either fixed at mono globally or stereo).

From my point of view, having to load the organ in stereo is a big step backwards from the mono multi-channel setup you can have in either the Standalone or Midi Sequencer versions, given that these allow you to hear individual pipes from alternate sides just as you would when playing a pipe organ.

Note also that you can can achieve a similar effect by adjusting the stereo balance using Hauptwerk v3 Advanced Edition's pipe/rank voicing screen. I.e. you can change the panning of any pipe to taste (whether mono or stereo), including panning it hard to one side or the other.

[micdev]

Thanks Martin for the explanation and workaround. Of course nothing is perfect and the Sonar-Pristine Space is "a workaround" for 64bit users while waiting for the built-in convolution reverb.... then everything will be PERFECT :-)

At the same time I would like to thank Rob Stefanussen for correcting and reviewing the English of my little website. Now the site is at version 1.0 (not beta anymore).

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have comments, questions or need a little help.

François

[Jim Reid]

Ok, Don Springer's enthusiasm for Pristine Space (and Reaper) has
convinced me to take the plunge!

Last evening, I ordered both Voxengo's Pristine Space and Cakewalk's
Sonar 7 via the online order process. Got an immediate acknowledgment
from Voxengo, but have not heard anything from Cakewalk. I assume
they both will be shipped via US Postal Serivce, Priority Mail. I chose
the more costly Sonar 7 over Reaper as I understand, maybe incorrectly,
that Reaper is not really going to provide 64-bit convolution?? I will
be running all this on my Mac Pro on an entirely separate hard drive
with XP-64, operating just fine, quite independent from Leopard on the
#1 hard drive.

Anyway, am now doing some prep work in anticipation. First problem,
at the moment I use 18 mono channels for all my sample sets. But,
it seems that the Hauptwerk VST plug-in will not accept other than
stereo samples! So must figure a new set of stereo layouts for
each of my dry sample sets; how to go about this?? I certainly like
the present spread of the ranks throughout my many audio channels.
Martin has described how to spread the two sides of a stereo array
using the pan feature on the voicing screen, but not absolutely sure
that is the what I would want to do. How separated ought the stereo
pair of speakers be using Pristine Space convolution reverb? With the
large VTPOs, how many ranks, of which sort ought to be fed to
one of, say "only" nine stereo channels. And, oh does the convolve
reverb exit the same speaker pair as that channel's dry output? Or
is the dry all gone, with the completely processed audio only feeding
from the convolver?

Obviously, I don't know what I am getting in to here! Or, maybe
Pristine Space can only handle 8 pair of stereo channels? In which
case how are the organ sample set ranks/percussions to be distributed
in some sensible way among all eight such channels, or......??

Any advice really appreciated before I go to far un-doing what I
now have operating just fine, but without convolution, only the
one channel of Lexicon reverb?

[Stefanussen]

Hi Jim,

Right now, for us 64-bit folks, Sonar is the only thing that will provide the convolution we're looking for. It allows 32-bit plugins to be used in a 64-bit environment (they call the technology bit-bridge)

I don't have any experience with multi-channel setups (though it's on the TODO list), but the way I see it you can go 1 of 3 directions. Someone please jump in if I'm totally off base.

• 9 stereo pairs of speakers in an even "surround sound" layout with 9 instances of PS running, one for each pair. You could tweak the reverb for each group, which could yield some very interesting results.
• If you want more separation of divisions, 9 stereo pairs of speakers grouped according to division. Again, with 9 instaces of PS running in Sonar.
• Use 16 speakers up front, and then 2 in back. The 16 are setup much like you have them now. The 2 in back are connected to a PS instance which receives the mixdown output from HW, thus going one step further in simulating an acoustic.

Has that been any help to you? Without a multi-channel setup of my own, I'm afraid I can't be very specific about the exact implementation, though I would think Francois' tutorial would be more than enough to implement any of those 3 options above.

[Jim Reid]

Thank you, Stefanussen,

Clearly, at least one of my concerns you did answer: more than
8 stereo pairs are possible with Sonar/Pristine Space. Will
have to do some thinking about your suggested array options; however,
I am pretty much confined to an "all in front" system--no room behind:
bird cages, dining table, etc. all in that part of the room!

Thanks again....

[Geoff Lloyd]

Right now, for us 64-bit folks, Sonar is the only thing that will provide the convolution we're looking for. It allows 32-bit plugins to be used in a 64-bit environment (they call the technology bit-bridge)

... unless you have an E-MU sound card, with Patchmix, in which case you can use Hauptwerk Midi Sequencer version with other software such as Reaper.

I chose the more costly Sonar 7 over Reaper as I understand, maybe incorrectly, that Reaper is not really going to provide 64-bit convolution??

Even apart from the possibility of now using 64bit Reaper with a 64bit plug-in, there's no need as far as I can tell to go for Sonar 7 when Sonar 6 does the same reverb job just as satisfactorily.

From my own experience so far, you can get good multi-channel 64bit convolution either through the Reaper/Midi Sequencer route (but with a draw back which I've not yet fully got over of the midi locking up if the latency is set very low) or through the Sonar (not necessarily Sonar 7) route (but with a draw back of having to revoice every pipe if you want to simulate mono multi-channels). On the other hand, the wet Standalone setup continues to be a treat!

Regards,

Geoff