I bought some sample sets in REX format and some VSTi instruments (the excellent Raging Guitars), and needed a platform to work with them - in particular, creating a project with guitar, bass, and drums set up for rapid song prototyping and exploiting my commercial content. Linux does offer some VST support, but I didn't want to reconfigure my Linux gig box or spend time struggling with system configuration so I decided to look within the wealth of Windows audio platforms.
I didn't want to cough up for a big commercial suite, so I tried some free and shareware programs. I was working with "Music Studio Independence" but couldn't create multiple instances of VSTi, the looping wasn't perfect so it would drift vs other audio sources, and the demo time limit was limiting.
A friend turned me onto Reaper, a shareware DAW with unrestricted demo. I had no problem creating a bunch of tracks each with their own VSTi driven by MIDI. I'm quite likely to pay for this software as it seems to meet all my needs.
For REX playback I used UVI Workstation an excellent free REX player. Reaper creates a bunch of output channels, but I didn't see how it was possible to send to the top half, and by default all loops send to main output - so for most instances I delete the other tracks. In UVI select the "Loop" tab then the "Map" tab, there is an icon of note score that you can drag to the timeline so that you can edit the MIDI to rearrange the break. You can load 8 REX files into 8 banks (each assigned to consecutive MIDI channel), but after dragging the MIDI into the timeline you'll need to open the sequence, select all, and set event channel to match the bank containing the loop. As far as I can tell, all the MIDI patterns in different channels need to be in the main timeline track for their events to drive the plugin.
Alieno is a free VSTi synth with a bunch of presets. The presets have abstract names so it is hard to find what you need, but there are some nice complex pads hidden within.
iblit is a free synth with some nice bass presets, a wide pitch-bend range, and the ability to map pitch bend differently for each synth component. I use this to generate sliding basslines.
TAL-Bassline is a nice free emulation of synth hardware, I use this for acid-style and arpeggiated basses.
DSK MiniDrumZ is a free VSTi with drums sounds from a handful of vintage devices, useful for rapid prototyping or retro sounds.
Now I have a Reaper project which is a template for prototyping new songs or generating a single guitar/bass/organ part for an existing song.
REAPER NOTES
right click in track area -> new track from virtual instrument. opens in record mode. select midi input. may need to toggle the speaker icon (track monitor) a few times to get midi flowing to plugin.
multiple MIDI tracks that send to one synth: create virtual instrument. select that track, right click, add track. new track i/o button, add send, send to virtual instrument track, audio-none
UVI WORKSTATION NOTES
Browse button to open browser. Select slot. Browse for sample. Load samples in each slot. Rex files will play at track tempo - while loading samples and when track is in play! Main. Select a slot, Loop, hit the Map button. Rex will no longer play. Drag and drop the note sequence into Reaper track. Now when track is played, each slice will play back in time to recreate loop.
Dropped midi data seems to always be channel 1, so after dropping midi data from a slot > 1, open the midi segment from track by double-clicking, select all, right click, and set midi channel to match the slot number.
Sometimes a new instance of workstation is not audible even though track meter shows activity. alt-r to open reaper routing matrix, make sure it is sending to master.
Advanced button lets you send each slot to a different output track. Selecting Main again seems to send to *two* tracks, so mute one. If using one track for all loops, you can delete the other outputs to keep your project clean.
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