Hi everyone,
I don't know if anyone else may find this useful, but I found a way,
using VI Pro to play both accompaniment and solo instrument at one time.
The main reason I found this helpful, is that you can sketch in
something, and have the left hand play the accompaniment, and the right
hand do the solo at the same time, which means you can create a kind of
sketch where you don't have to play one track at a time but all at once.
The problem is that on one keyboard, you end up playing both instruments
at once – in this case the oboe notes would end up playing with all the
harp notes, and you would have to restrict your accompaniment notes
from the harp, to the section on the keyboard below the bottom note of
the oboe or whatever solo instrument you choose to use. With VI Pro, I
could restrict the harp notes and the oboe into regions of the keyboard
and I was able to tranpose the harp part of the keyboard down, so I got
the pitch section of the harp where I would most likely want to use.
After watching the video demo's about VI Pro, I wondered if I could do
this, but the main problem for me was that the accompaniment notes on
the harp would be restricted to the bass area of the harp in the left
hand.
So, I put in both instruments patches into the VI Pro, and worked out
what my lowest note on the Oboe would be for my sketch, and then set the
upper note of the Harp to being just under that, and then, to solve the
problem of my being restricted to the bass note areas of the harp, I
transposed the
Harp down an octave, so that my left hand was playing the notes in the
Treble area of the
harp one octave lower, which means my accompaniment notes are not
restricted to just to the bass notes of the Harp. So, that transposition
feature of VI Pro solved this problem.
If you have VI Pro and want to try this out, the vi pro preset for the Song Without Words in B minor for Oboe and Harp is here:
http://www.box.net/shared/876ep079oy
the VI Pro preset for the Arioso for Oboe and Harp in D minor is here:
http://www.box.net/shared/d8mj5cheer
I've done some examples of music that uses this preset and themes that I've used for other music.
Here's the playback of the Arioso in D minor using vi Pro to get
accompaniment and solo on one midi keyboard and one midi track for this
music in Cubase. It uses a VSL Oboe patch and a Harp patch:
http://soundcloud.com/stevemartinalmonds/arioso-for-oboe-and-harp-in-d
In the next example, I took the midi track from this, and separated it
into two different parts, and played other parts over it to get this
result which is an audio mix of the different parts:
http://soundcloud.com/stevemartinalmonds/arioso-oboe-orchstrl-accomp-in
Here is the recorded playback of the music from another track using VI
Pro with the French Oboe legato patch, and the Harp Patch, again on one
keyboard and one midi track in Cubase.
http://soundcloud.com/stevemartinalmonds/song-without-words-in-b-minor
I then did the same as before, separated the one midi track into two
parts, and played other parts over it to get the following eventual
audio mix:
http://soundcloud.com/stevemartinalmonds/song-without-words-in-b
I also did a transcription of the Arioso in D minor from Cubase into Sibelius 6 and this is a pdf of the Sibelius score.
http://www.box.net/shared/zyshyfcxbj
I hope someone else may find this aspect of VI Pro handy for doing some composition sketching.
Best,
Steve.