I'm seriously ready to quit. 20 years ago I used to make a ton of music on a hardward sequencer with a 24 character LCD screen. And I was great at it. Now I have all this power of Cubase and Vienna, and I just can't get any creative flow. I can use Cubase in general pop music recording, but orchestral just seems different. It's making me nuts.
Here's some of why -- I have to try to setup my keyboard or the VSL presets because it's got 61 keys and all the Vienna presets are made for 88-key keyswitches. Then map MIDI CC to expression, cross-fade, etc.... How to do this for all different instruments, then set up 30 track templates in Cubase with all instruments laid out, etc.... Does everyone go through this torture? How do you get anything done?
All I wanted to do was write some neat orchestral music like I used to do in college, and I'm just running into 42 yr old frustration with analysis paralysis. What's worse -- I'm actually a computer programmer (senior, significantly respected at work) and I just can't get this stuff to flow like I did with much simpler tools. I must be missing something simple? I feel like I just need to see the light.
Does anyone have starting point suggestions? What's your creative flow? Do you have a video of how you get started and how you lay down tracks, do you work with a click track when doing orchestral or just work freely, etc... Stuff like that.
I have Cubase 7 and Vienna Special Edition 1 (basic orchestra and a few solo). Just got a Nektar Panorama P6 keyboard with the new Cubase integration. (I also have an Alesis QS8 weighted 88, but I didn't think it had the right stuff to work with Cubase like the new controllers do, and weighted was hard for me to play faster parts, but maybe I should have gotten the P1 and kept my keys.)