It's easier than you think
At first glance, setting up Divisimate with Vienna Ensemble Pro with all those MIDI ports can look complicated. In fact, it’s not. Once you’ve got the hang of the signal flow, it’s actually not so different to using Divisimate alone with a DAW on the one hand or VE Pro with a DAW on the other hand. It’s just those two concepts combined. If you are familiar with the setup of VE Pro, it’s as simple as adding Divisimate before the MIDI data enters your DAW, all the rest stays the same.
In order to make use of this setup with VSL Synchron Prime Edition, you will need to take the following steps:
1. Installing Instruments
The template was designed for the use with virtual instruments by Vienna Symphonic Library. In order for them to work as intended, licenses and installations of the following libraries are required.
Synchron Prime Edition
The Synchron Prime Edition is a comprehensive selection of orchestral instruments recorded at the renowned Synchron Stage Vienna.
There is a free 30-day trial available for this library.
Vienna Soft Imperial
To include a piano in the template, we used the Soft Imperial, a free piano instrument available for Synchron Player.
This library is available for free at vsl.co.at.
2. Downloading Preset Files & Performances
The first step of course is to download the Synchron presets and Divisimate Performances needed for the template. Click the button below to start the download:
The downloaded file is compressed as a zip-archive. Unpack the archive and save its contents to a safe place to use them in the next steps.
3. Preparing Divisimate
Import Performances
Open Divisimate and navigate to the “Perform” Tab. Open the menu on the upper left and click on “Manage”.
In the Performance Manager you can now import a performance including all of its presets. Click on “Import…” at the bottom right, navigate to the folder where you saved the downloaded files and select the first downloaded *.dpfe file.
Repeat this process for any other Performances that you wish to use in Divisimate.
Now you can load your Performance of choice and use all included presets in Divisimate.
Optional: Import Trigger Plugin Presets
In the download there is also a folder named “Divsimate Plugin Presets” with two presets for the Trigger plugin.
Open Divisimate and in the preset menu click “Manage” (Cmd+M / Ctrl+M). This will open up the folder containing all presets and user settings for Divisimate. Navigate to the plugins folder, create a subfolder “Trigger”, and within that a subfolder “Presets”. If you previously saved Trigger presets yourself, this folder will already exist.
Copy the content’s of the downloaded folder in this directory. After this you will be able access the presets in the preset menu of the trigger plugin.
4. Preparing the DAW Project
Next, open your DAW of choice and create a new project. This will be the project in which you recreate the template routings.
Create 32 individual MIDI tracks in your project. Each of these tracks will need to be set to receive MIDI from a different Divisimate Port.
This process will be a bit different in every DAW. Basically it is the same setup you always have when working with VE Pro, just that the inputs of your MIDI tracks have to be set to the Divisimate Ports 01 through 32. Some DAWs requiere a couple of extra steps to make the Divisimate Ports visible or to avoid unwanted MIDI duplicates on all the ports. Therefore make sure to read through the DAW specific setup instructions we provide in our Quickstart Guides.
Here’s the layout of track names, instruments and Divisimate port assignments you need to recreate:
Divisimate Port 1: Piccolo
Divisimate Port 2: Flute 1
Divisimate Port 3: Flute 2
Divisimate Port 4: Oboe 1
Divisimate Port 5: Oboe 2
Divisimate Port 6: English Horn
Divisimate Port 7: Clarinet 1
Divisimate Port 8: Clarinet 2
Divisimate Port 9: Bass Clarinet
Divisimate Port 10: Bassoon 1
Divisimate Port 11: Bassoon 2
Divisimate Port 12: Contrabassoon
Divisimate Port 13: Horn 1
Divisimate Port 14: Horn 2
Divisimate Port 15: Horn 3
Divisimate Port 16: Horn 4
Divisimate Port 17: Trumpet 1
Divisimate Port 18: Trumpet 2
Divisimate Port 19: Trumpet 3
Divisimate Port 20: Trumpet 4
Divisimate Port 21: Tenor Trombone 1
Divisimate Port 22: Tenor Trombone 2
Divisimate Port 23: Tenor Trombone 3
Divisimate Port 24: Bass Trombone
Divisimate Port 25: Tuba
Divisimate Port 26: Percussion 1
Divisimate Port 27: Percussion 2
Divisimate Port 28: 1st Violin
Divisimate Port 29: 2nd Violin
Divisimate Port 30: Violas
Divisimate Port 31: Cellos
Divisimate Port 32: Double Basses
Depending on your DAW you can save yourself some routing work by starting off with our Universal Orchestral Template, which is an empty template readily named and with prerouted Divisimate Ports. You can get it here.
Be aware that this template is set up with tracks that are meant to be populated with instruments inside the DAW. Depending on your DAW and your preferred VE Pro workflow you may want to set up things differently and maybe it’s quicker to just create those tracks from scratch in the first place, than adjusting the Universal Orchestral Template.
5. Loading the Instruments
Now you should have all of the instrument tracks routed and correctly named. Next up, create a new VE Pro instance where you will load the instruments. Also connect the 32 MIDI tracks to your VE Pro instance as you always do.
We prepared instrument-presets for all of the VSL Synchron Prime instruments we have in our templates. You can download them by clicking on the following button: extract the presets and save them to your User Presets folder.
To access your User Presets folder open an instance of Vienna Synchron Player and go to the settings window. In the database tab it will show you the path of your user presets folder, and even allow to specify a different path. Navigate to that folder and copy the contents of “Synchron Presets” folder from your download.
Now the presets will show up in the “User” section of the Synchron Player. Right click in the browser and choose “Refresh” if the presets to not show up immediately.
Insert 32 instances of Vienna Synchron Player in VE Pro and load the appropriate preset for each track following the numbers of the preset. As you do that take sure to load the Percussion preset on two subsequent instances.
Name the instruments in accordingly in VEPro to keep a good overview.
6. Final Adjustments
Now there are just some global mixing settings left to made. Depending on your preferred workflow you can either adjust this directly in VE Pro or – if you have single instrument returns to your DAW – you can do it inside your DAW:
- Set all faders of the Woodwind and Percussion sections to 0dB.
- Set all faders of the Brass and String sections to -3dB.
- Create an FX return bus with a reverb of your choice and route a send from every track to this bus. The appropriate send amount will depend on your reverb and also your taste, in most DAWs we liked an amount somewhere between -9dB and -6dB.
- Where possible, we grouped the sections (Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, Strings) and assigned each group a VCA fader or a group bus, but that’s only for convenience, so it’s entirely up to you if you want to do the same.
Finally, you can record enable all the tracks in your DAW, load one of the presets from the dedicated performances in Divisimate and start making music.
Have fun playing, composing and exploring the orchestrations we prepared for you!
