Traditional composing studios used to lean heavily on massive orchestral templates. It’s kind of a throwback to the days when computers just couldn’t handle all the processing, so you’d need a second (or even third) server to offload the demanding DSP work.
The thinking was simple: a fully fleshed-out orchestral template should contain absolutely everything you might possibly need, because loading individual articulations on the fly was both time-consuming and resource-hungry.
Sure, a giant template could take half an hour or more to preload, but that was considered a necessary evil if you wanted an “instant access” system where every articulation was sitting there ready to go.
The funny thing is, a lot of composers still seem glued to this habit, even though the landscape has changed dramatically. These days, fast CPUs, SSD drives, and super-efficient software mean you can stream most libraries in real time without breaking a sweat.
Now, that’s fine for small projects – say under 10 tracks – but when you start dealing with larger, more complex compositions, you still hit bottlenecks. At least, that’s the assumption we’ve all carried forward.
Or so we thought.
Let’s talk about MIDI
A “traditional” orchestral template often means hundreds (sometimes thousands) of tracks. The reason is obvious: every instrument has multiple articulations, and each one gets its own track.
For example, first violins could easily consist of at least 16 articulations in a standard library. Spitfire’s pro series can push that number up over 30+. Do the math: even a modest 16 articulations adds up to 80 tracks when you multiply that over the other instruments in the string section. Multiply that by four or five libraries if you’re layering, then throw in brass, woodwinds, percussion, synths, FX, and whatever else you fancy – plus all the FX, stem and routing busses – and suddenly your session looks like a nightmare spreadsheet.
It works, but it comes with serious downsides. Beyond the raw DSP load, navigating these monster templates is painful.
It’s almost impossible to keep continuity across all those articulation tracks and libraries. Dynamics don’t stay in sync, and layering gets messy. You end up doing things like trying to line up a “long con sordino” on one track with a “tremolo” on another, which means juggling multiple MIDI layers and praying nothing drifts. And get ready for a total nightmare if you, heaven forbid, want to use short staccato and stacatissimo on the same instrument, you could have a spaghetti mess of short notes all over the place you need to juggle.
Then you need to consider bouncing this hot mess down into workable stems, converting a MIDI nightmare into a further WAV nightmare. Presenting your mix engineer with hundreds of spotty tracks they’ll need to somehow juggle, will only cost you money in the long run as they try to somehow convert into something like a cohesive mix
What about Key Switching?
Another option people lean on is keyswitching. The idea is to load all the articulations into one instance of Kontakt or whatever platform you’re using, and use MIDI notes to trigger them. Much tidier in theory, but in practice, it’s messy and inflexible.
Move a note, change pitch, or shift a phrase and suddenly your keyswitches are out of sync. You can’t apply MIDI CC independently – everything shares the same CC lane, plus most importantly, you can’t trigger more than one keyscitch at a time.
Why is that important? It is very conceivable you want to play a chord that has multiple articulations applied, such as a low open D sustain on a cello with a higher note that is tremolo. This is very important for percussion work, as often you have multiple articulations being triggered at the same time. Keyswitching can’t trigger more than one articulation, so unless you use multiple instances, you’ll need to do some very clunky sample-level offsetting in your sequencer.
Lets not get bogged down in all that, there is a much easier and tactile way to approach this.
The solution: MIDI channel notes
Ok, lets focus now on the simplest and most elegant solution to large orchestral projects – MIDI note channels, or in simpler terms – giving every note in your arrangement its own personal sample library. I know the term should be ‘Note MIDI Channels’, which makes way more sense, but the naming conventions is out of my hands.
So imagine you’ve got a violin instrument with three articulations, long, short and tremolo. Instead of splitting each articulation out onto its own track, you keep them all together inside the same instance of Kontakt and assign each a unique MIDI channel number.
- MIDI Channel 1 is longs
- MIDI Channel 2 is shorts
- and MIDI channel 3 is tremolo
Now you can simply go through your part arrangments and assign each individual note to its corresponding MIDI channel. All the longs notes are channel 1, shorts are channel 2 and tremolo are channel 3. Easy so far, right?
Check out the image below. The long notes (MIDI channel 1) are teal in colour, the shorts are blue (MIDI channel 2) and the dark purple are the tremolo’s (MIDI channel 3). I also have a pink note, which is a pizzicato (I assigned this this MIDI channel 4)
The colours used in this demonstration are completly arbitrary and up to you personal taste, but I try to use colours that are rather contrasting to each other so at a distance you can clearly see the articulations. Also, the colour buttons I have in my Reaper template are custom made, something I will talk about in an upcoming article. For now you will need to select your notes then right click and assign the MIDI channel like that.
Why is this so effective? Here’s the big reveal – because those channel assignments stick. It doesn’t matter where you move those notes, what pitch you change it to, or how it overlaps, or even if you copy and paste them to completly new instrument tracks – if it’s marked channel 1, it’s always triggering MIDI channel 1.
That alone solves a mountain of headaches.
MIDI Envelopes
It gets better. MIDI Note Channels also opens up more realistic performance possibilities with MIDI envelopes. Let me explain.
Ordinarily you would have a single channel for MIDI CC, such as dynamics. This means each and every articulation track would need its own MIDI CC for dynamics and there would be no cross-integration between performances.
So, for instance, if you had a violin instrument track with long, con sordino, tremolo and trills – each articulation track would need their own discrete CC envelopes, meaning either manually performing the CC with your MIDI controller or hand drawing each in.
We all know that pain.
With MIDI note channels your are not confined by seperate performances, as all the articulations exsist on the same track. This means you can create MIDI CC performances for each MIDI channel, or all of them at once.
So, how do you play individual MIDI channels now?
I’m sure this question has crossed your mind, how do you play articulations that assigned to seperate MIDI channels?
Easy really, send the MIDI channel from your keyboard!
On my Yamaha Montage this is as simply as selecting a channel in the performance editor, this sends the corresponding MIDI data to the DAW, your keyboard might be different. But basically lean on your hardware MIDI controller to define what MID channel you’re playing within your DAW – thats exsactly what they’re made to do.
Its also possible to send multiple channels from my keyboard by selecting keyboard control for each performance channel (its a Yamaha thing, though I’m sure most keyboards can do it). Effectivly it allows you to play one or many articulations at the same time.
The same process for performing in MIDI CC envelopes. Set your controller to the desired MIDI output channel and play it in.
Is this MIDI Note Channel trick only a Reaper thing?
The short answer is no, Bitwig Studio and Cubase both offer MIDI note channel support, but no one does it as elegant as Reaper, mainly due to Reapers incredible macro scripting.
If you look closely at the images above of the MIDI Editor you will see bright colours buttons marked 1 through 10. These are custom scripted macros that allow me to easily assign MIDI channels to selected notes.
Related to this, Reaper has fantastic note-taking functionality, which is the ability to apply text documents directly to either your project, each track or even each block of MIDI data directly. This is essential for recording the MIDI assignments of your articulations for quick reference – for as much as we strive to replicate somewhat standard articulations across our projects, not all sample libraries use the same articulation layouts, so you will find the ability to keep notes very handy.
Next up
Next week I’ll dig deeper into how to actually build a MIDI note channel workflow and squeeze ridiculous amounts of efficiency out of your system. Seriously, it’ll make you rethink what your computer can handle.
Check my video below covering more of this topic.
