Hello good people,
I’m an online music teacher managing a youtube channel @piyanoogreniyoruz and not expert of digital music producing but need to learn it to share my tutorial videos with students. I used to do it with dummy ways since 2019 and decided to learn the tools whose inerested to same things. Then first begun with VMPK, Qsynth and SimpleScreenRecorder. While recording my digital piano with a top camera up there, i recorded VMPK and the sound with SimpleScreenRecorder. That was very easy and effective way to me because its simple to setup a soundfont in Qsynth and get the piano key strokes as visual via VMPK . As you can see i didnt record the MIDI data at all because sound was recorded by SimpleScreenRecorder. But afterwards i needed to record it because Qsynth doesnt support plugins and i needed some more effects relay some EQ etc. But not much because for my goal that was enough. So i tried to learn Qtractor.And produced some videos using it too. And then i met the Ardour. Excellent interface and i guess there are more supporters .
Thats my short story and now what i want to learn:
I didnt use harware synths at all in my life so i didnt know the logic .
Ardour, i guess, places the synth emulators called plugins into a frame called “mixer” as a stack. So i placed ACE Fluid Synth for soundfonts and some effects and Dexer as well for its interactive virtual keyboard .
My questions are
What is the logic under the plugin stack in the mixer? I see they connected each other via some ports colored red and green . My stack is like that
With this configuration ACE Fluid Synth is not work but Dexed does. If i put the Dexed up this time ACE works Dexed not. And i need to understand the logic which is behind it.
Should i use the Jack to include the VMPK to the game?
Dexed virtual keyboard shows C3 when i press the C4 ( fourth octave of the C note on the 88 keys piano) is the solution in Ardour or in Dexed? I didnt find any setting about it in Dexed interfaces.
Sorry for this long text , hope its have read and well understood. Because english is not my native language.
Best regards.
Göksel
ps: Found a great topic about “mixer strip” reading and trying to understand it.
But it will be appreciated if you share your experience here tho.
Regarding your first question, I think it’s because a synth plugin will receive MIDI as an input, and will render this as audio to the output.
The lines in your “stack” represent connections between the processing blocks. So, by stacking Fluid Synth and Dexed in this way, you are connecting the audio output of Fluid Synth to the input of Dexed (or vice versa).
A synth plugin cannot (normally) do anything with an audio input. It can only receive and render MIDI data. Thus, the latter synth plugin will be mute.
I hope this helps.
If you want to have both synth plugins playing at the same time, one way to do this would be to put them onto separate tracks and connect the tracks to the same MIDI input.
This also allows more control of the separate synths as they each have their own mixer strip and can be controlled through the main mixer levels to set their respective levels, and can have other plugin effects (such as compression or reverb) individually applied.
You can also group the separate tracks if you want to perform some operations on them simultaneously.
“A synth plugin cannot (normally) do anything with an audio input. It can only receive and render MIDI data. Thus, the latter synth plugin will be mute.”
Thats the key point and helped to my understanding indeed. Thank you so MUCH!
I keep reading Ardour Documentation about mixer strip and drop the notes. I dont know whether i will meet the info you shared me but added it into my notes already.
Actually i use the Dexer’s interactive virtual keyboard , not effects . So I can use both ACE Fluid Synth and Dexer without any additional configuration , that solves my problem , Thanks again Keith , have a nice time.
Göksel
Regarding this point, the octave number is not a universal convention and there’s a degree of geography involved.
Middle C is mostly considered to be C3 in Europe, but in other parts of the world is considered to be C4. So whether you get C3 or C4 depends on which convention the plugin author is most familiar with.
Yes I have read it when googling for it . But interesting indeed , it could be easly parametric , it has only two options. Anyways , also it doesnt have options to show the key names or not. So i guess i need to look for another plugin for this . Thanks for your valuable time Keith. Appreciated.
As Keith Milner Majik has explained, a synthesizer is a sound generator and although a few, very few synths have an audio input for a vocoder, for example, “usually” a generator does not have an audio input.
Modular synths are a separate case, with them things are different and are usually fun, due to their alternative connection possibilities.
The “normal” thing in a software synth is that it has a midi input to receive the data from the midi keyboard and the output of the synth is audio, that is why it did not work as you expected and the correct thing, as you have already seen, is to put them in different channels.
Another thing is to put an effect (a compressor, an equalizer, a delay, etc.), one after another on the same channel, that does work, because there is an input and output signal.
Regards
“Another thing is to put an effect (a compressor, an equalizer, a delay, etc.), one after another on the same channel, that does work, because there is an input and output signal.”
Indeed , in my new configuration Ace Fluid Synth and Calf Reverb works fine together.
Thank you for your nice reply and links, with your help guys it has been more easy to understand the things than begining. Appreciated.
