Introducing the Control Series for MetaGrid Pro - Cinematic Studio Strings Edition. The Control Series gives you more control over your virtual instrument libraries and speeds up your process by addressing specific characteristics and use cases of a specific library. In this edition the focus is on setting and applying customizable timing offsets for each articulation and each instrument in Cinematic Studio Strings.
Includes GridIron: a timing offset editor for each articulation and each instrument in the library. Edit timings how you like, edit macros how you like, and the app will generate a whole new set of grids and integrate it into your workspace, ready to go. It accounts for any track offset you use.
Control Series features:
Select and assign articulations directly from the grid in Cubase (using Keyboard Maestro)
Custom macros
Custom expression maps
Custom Kontakt patches with new articulation combinations
Custom MIDI Remote for Cubase to enable all of the commands
“Launch projects” with tracks already set up for integration with Cubase and VEPro
Full Support for Cubase 15 and the new expression map features coming soon! I’m accentuating the new features to make things even faster.Available now in the Metagrid Pro app, inside “Presets”. Keyboard Maestro is available at keyboardmaestro.com All products here are copyright their respective owners. No endorsement is implied or should be inferred.
Seems odd to have so few MIDI editing tools on those grids IMO. I would have maybe the articulations and faders on one grid and an extensive set of MIDI editing tools on another.
And libraries like Berlin Strings and Duality Strings have 5 times as many articulations as CSS which would require the whole grid and then some to accommodate.
And why no Transport?.
And why use Keyboard Maestro? For the same price you can get Bome MIDI Translator Pro which is a dedicated MIDI transforming tool. Makes more sense when dealing with MIDI editing and orchestral libraries. AND it works on both PC and Mac.
It’s not intended to be an all-in-one tool for MIDI editing by any means. I didn’t want to re-invent the wheel, especially given that many people use the MIDI editor page from MetaGrid Pro, and it’s easy to keep that in the sidebar. I think it’s great to have a few things in it that speed up parts of the process. As far as controllers for this particular instrument, a lot of the CC’s are problematic - in fact I have it from the creator of the library that you just shouldn’t use other CC’s than are specified in the documentation - a large number of them also do other things that make the library work, and stability is a priority for me. We will see what the future brings for the library, but for now the parameters it publishes to Kontakt are best avoided for the most part.
I have a system for using libraries like Berlin and Synchron Strings Pro that I find very elegant - quick access to everything the library does. That will be available soon. But this library isn’t those, so I can do things differently from that.
Why no transport? I gave it thought, but working with a library and writing small details happens on a different scale from playback for other reasons - so I included an “editor’s pre-roll”, independent from the preroll you have as a key command on your keyboard, that gets you back just enough to make sure a transition works or the like. Because transport functions are so common and so many people have those kinds of functions as key commands, I found that not trying to do everything in a grid gave me more room for comfortably-sized buttons, reducing mis-keying, and for making a surface that wasn’t utterly bristling with buttons. For me that is a quality of life issue. Others may have their own take on that, and nobody’s wrong - what works for you is what you should do.
Why use Keyboard Maestro? It does a lot of things really well, and goes beyond the scope of MIDI commands to do a lot of cool things. There’s comparison of features and then there’s also taste and familiarity - and I chose to do it this way. Like MIDI Translator, it does a lot of things, and it has a broad base of users and good support, and has great integration with MetaGrid Pro. There are free alternatives for people on Windows systems that do what my approach requires, so there’s a roadmap for that. But we all use what we use - if you are heavily invested in MIDI Translator and happy with it, then it sounds like you have what you need.
I hope that answers your questions - if you have more I’m here to answer them.
Most people (myself included) have multiple string libraries. For the sake of uniformity and muscle memory, I have everything in the same place across all libraries i.e. articulations on one or two grids (with transport) and a MIDI editing/pattern editing grid(s) accessible via an ergonomically positioned button(s).
Sounds like you have things the way you want them to be. That’s great. Lots of ways to go about things. I don’t remember at the moment how many string libraries I have, some better than others, and most of them have different approaches, so they have differences in how they are laid out. To each their own - there’s no wrong way to do it.
