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  • Workflow for Vienna Ensemble Pro?

    Hey all,

    So years ago I picked up VEP 4 and never really used it; didn't end up needing it for the intended use case. Fast forward to now, I've recently built a Proxmox VM Server and plan on putting two 2TB NVME drives in it (maybe putting them in RAID 0), and serving (I guess) both an SMB share and drive on a Windows based VM over a 10G network. My studio computer is also set for 10G networking already. The server is equipped with a Threadripper 3960x and 64GB of Ram, but if I move forward with this project, will add 32GB more to it.

    I'm considering putting VEP 7 on a VM instance. What I'd like to know however is how do you all manage your workflows?

    I've seen a couple videos stating that they make their templates where they reserve VEP for instruments that don't need any customization (which I kind of question how you determine this really since I sort of modify everything), and add the highly customized instruments (say certain synths) to the native DAW. Other videos have everything including highly modified instruments within VEP entirely.

    Some questions I'd like answered before I can make a purchase decision to upgrade:

    1. If you do make a base template, modify it for a particular song, and start a new song, do you have to reload ALL the instruments again when going back to a base template?

    2. Some of the videos I saw save their custom version of their base template with the project separately. If this is you, how do you track/document that a certain project has a custom template attached to it?

    3. I'm not entirely sure how preserve or decouple work, but am I right to assume that say you have a template that includes say your regular orchestra and custom synths particular to a project, that you can decouple the orchestra and preserve or save the synths with the DAW project? How might that work on recall?


  • First off, rule of thumb: Whatever you may 'customize' on the fly by CC automation does not count when choosing your instruments that go inside VEP in your template. There you tweak everything so it would be a sensible starting point for any project, save it an leave it.

    Most options you can get out of sampled instruments by CC automation. The more you use it the less you feel the need to go back into the instrument's GUI to tweak. It takes a bit of thought and setting up, but it is worth it.

    Mostly only synths or specific sound design tools etc. would fall under the category of instruments that you'd like to load directly in the DAW.

    The whole idea of a template is that you DON'T have to modify your template for the next project.

    "Decoupled" is the mode that you'd want to run VEP in most of the time. In "coupled" mode changed from within the DAW get applied to VEP whereas in "decoupled" mode everything stays as you left it independently from whatever you do in the DAW. (E.g. you don't want to have to purge all sample data each time you close a project.) Also, "coupled" mode is a tighter connection to the DAW and naturally, you will feel it by the fact that everything would feel a bit more sluggish and not as snappy as with "decoupled".