I can't make it obey its own commands, let alone anything else's

I bought Garritan when it first came out, entranced by the wonderful things I was hearing on the demo part of the website. Installed it, as per instructions. But it totally refuses to play ball.

You slide any of its sliders, turn any of its knobs and the sounds remain completely unfazed and unchanged. You plug it into Cubase, issue Cubase commands to it, again the sounds never change. They all permanently sound as though the mike's right up inside the instrument somewhere. If you set Velocity below 20, or Volume below 20 the note goes off altogether. If it's 21, it's on full-blast.

I've had 2 people come to try to make Garritan play ball. One of them was a professional sound engineer - I paid him 40 quid because he said I had to pay him for his time, he actually achieved nothing. Zilch. A professional spacerock composer also retired weeping and defeated(!) Neither could make the notes change. You get on full blast, complete silence, nothing in between.

Please, if you know Garritan and know how to make it DO things, let me know what the secret is. I'd love to use it. I agree the sounds are probably better than Edirol - which I'm also fighting along similar lines, but you can make SLIGHT differences to its sounds. Again, not as much difference as you should be able to make, by a very long way - they still blare too much, I think, but they are more controllable.

If you can use Garritan, AND make it obey Velocity/Volume instructions without them just being on/off - please tell me how!

On the subject of Edirol - why does it have SO MANY of each instrument? I mean, there has to be 30 pianos in the list, for example. Why not just one piano, one clavichord, spinet etc. Who ever uses 30 pianos in one composition?

Yours with willingness to learn

Chris.

Hi Chris...

Garritan needs some kind of player associated with it, you can not just load the sounds directly. I use the Kontakt player, which I believes ships with GPO. If it doesn't, I believe there is a freeware version out there.

From the Cubase ->"Add VST Instrument" and add the Kontakt player, and within this player you load different Garritan instruments inside the channels. Depending on how much RAM you have, you can load from 1 to X sounds on different channels.

Then in Cubase -> AddMidiTrack, and for midi out of the track choose a Kontakt channel, and for the midi in choose your midi in, or just draw in the track for testing purposes.

Now you have full control over the volume by using the sllider of the midi track instead of the somewhat flawed volume control of the player.

I guess I am a little hard on the new people that come in, it's just my nature to rib and tease. I tried Edirol, and everything is so electronic sounding. I don't even think those are real instruments. Now I use EastWest Gold edition, it is pretty solid.

The reason for all the different pianos in Edirol, is depending on what you want, there are different sounds. For one application I might want a Steinway or Bossendorfer grand, for another I might want an older upright sounding piano, and for another I might want a cripser baby grand. But unfortunately, I hate them all in Edirol. I can not believe those hacks make money on unsuspecting, untrained newbs with underdeveloped ears. I do not agree with pirated or hacked software, but I do make an exception in the case of Edirol.


Try the above suggestion with Garritan, and see if you do not get it to work properly, and good luck. I am always happy to help if I can, after one perseveres through the initial sarcasm. Feel free to ask questions, yet choose words wisely! hehe

-RhoneRanger