Hello again! Hope everyone is doing great.
I wonder if anyone here knows how to resolve a seemingly simple issue.
I've got a guitar emulation plugin in VEP. The "left hand", i.e. the "fretboard" receives chord information on MIDI channels 1-15, while the "right hand" (hits and strums) is controlled via MIDI channel 16. So, I need two tracks for every guitar instrument: a "main" one that will send MIDI to VEP on Ch. 1 and receive audio back from VEP, and an "auxiliary" one that will just transmit MIDI to VEP on Ch. 16.
I would like to have a single instance of VEP for my guitars (for example, Nylon - Ch.1, Steel - Ch.2, Electric - Ch.3 etc.), feeding audio into separate tracks of Logic. In theory, it can be accomplished by setting the channels in VEP to receive on different MIDI ports, but here's the problem: I cannot figure out how to set it up in Logic.
A Logic's multi-timbral instrument connected to VEP AU3 multi-output plugin lets you choose a different VEP MIDI port for every track. However, it won't allow individual control of volume, panning etc. Adjusting a parameter on one track automatically sets the rest of the tracks to the same value. Therefore, if I need different volume/panning settings for my guitars, I must do it in VEP, which is far from ideal.
I could make a separate multi-timbral AU3 instrument for each guitar, but you cannot connect different instruments to the same instance. My understanding is that the more instances I create, the higher the chance of making other instances "starve" and choke. Also, having a bunch of instances for each individual instrument is less than elegant and hard to keep organized.
Tracks created from the AUX channels of a multi-output VEP plugin won't work, either, as you cannot assign them to different MIDI ports of VEP. They are hard-wired to the MIDI port of the main track ("output", as they call it in Logic 11).
I know how to route a MIDI track in Cubase to a VST instrument, it's very straight-forward. In Logic, however, it seems absolutely impossible. I've been fiddling with Environment objects, but so far, no joy. Even when I deactivate channels 1-15 in a MIDI instrument and route Ch. 16 to a guitar object in the Environment Mixer, it still transmits on Ch. 1 and messes up my chords. I've even tried inserting a MIDI Transformer between the MIDI instrument and the Mixer track to filter out anything that is not a note on Ch. 16, but it just doesn't seem to work.
Any ideas will be greatly appreciated!!!