How do you use VCV with a DAW? (Techniques, Ideas)

VCV Rack
21

it’s been a while since it came out, a major plus IMHO is that you can open multiple instances.
I really enjoy it, because of my messy nature, so I can have i.e. 4 small patches instead of a big 1, it fits best my workflow, and I can be more tidy with external effects as well.

add some weird plugin (like “Teleport” modules and the “Stoermelder” stuff, just to name two) and I can’t think about something I cannot do. if you have the PRO version every now and then you get some new module (i.e. Compressor this year) as another plus.

I was scared to update to 2.5.1 so I waited for the end of a couple of projects of mine, and I’m having no problems with 2.5.2 in these days. ok, I didn’t push it hard yet, but I’m confident.

the only minus since the summing cables on input ports came out is that I can be more messy, and trust me, I will be!

this year I managed to live export/write in ambisonics while playing live on a hybrid setup with an ES-9, ok it’s more DAW related that Rack itself, but the MIDI-CV / CV-MIDI / CCs and so on have worked as expected, and I feel somehow that Rack works as a connector in my workflow.
in another project I managed to sync and interact on a video (stream + interactive/generative) while playing live, everything linked to TouchDesigner, all inside 1 windows laptop (win10, intel i7 2.9Ghz, 48GB of RAM, quadro M5000M) on Reaper. btw, OSC messages work, but I’m not that good in TouchDesigner, so I ended up working with MIDI.

now I wish they do an official Linux ARM version for my Raspberry Pi and stay as light on the CPU as they can!

22

As a vst I use VCV in multiple small patches which I combine with other plugins in Ableton Live.

The workflow of VCV (with audio and CV) sparks my imagination more then working with midi only. But the way you can chain different tracks/effects etc in a DAW is much easier then in standalone VCV. So I just take the best of two in some projects (mainly sound design and composition for theatre and podcasts)

When I am experimenting, studying a kind of synthesis technique or emulating a certain hardware device, I use the standalone version more.

1 Like
23

Hmm. Let me see… I’ll have to open up one my early (simpler) patches to recall how I did it.

  • Open up the “Audio MIDI Setup” app. It’s probably buried in the Utilities folder.
  • Go to the “Window” drop-down menu and open “MIDI Studio”.
  • It should show a virtual MIDI device, “IAC Driver”. Double-click on that icon to open “IAC Driver Properties”, and put a check in the box for “Device is online”. Maybe make sure it also says “Bus 1”. (On my system, it shows that I’ve also got drivers for an Alesis QMini USB musical keyboard and for a USB Uno MIDI Interface.)
  • I’m not sure if you need to do this, but in GarageBand/Settings/Audio-MIDI there is a “Reset MIDI drivers” button. It would hurt to click at that.
  • Select an instrument in GarageBand (eg. “Steinway Grand Piano”), and make sure the volume is turned up.
  • Open a Rack patch and select the module “CV▸MIDI” from the library.
  • Right-click on the black window in “CV▸MIDI” and select “IAC Driver Bus 1”
  • Plug any V/Oct source (say, from a sequencer) into CV▸MIDI’s “V/OCT” input jack, and patch any gate signal (or trigger?) source into CV▸MIDI’s “GATE” input jack. Optionally, provide a VELocity and/or VOLume CV for CV▸MIDI.
  • Start up your sequencer (or whatever) and then GarageBand should be playing it.

Getting the GarageBand sound back into VCV Rack is a bit more work.

Download and install “BlackHole”, from here. Once it’s installed, it appears as if it was a another bit of audio hardware. It doesn’t really have a dedicated app to mess with settings for it.

  • Oops. Now I’m stuck. I don’t recall exactly how I did it, but I had set up two BlackHole devices. One is simply “BlackHole 2ch” and the other is one I named “BlackHole+Headphones” so that I could optionally use headphones at the same time. [later - Oh, wait, maybe I did that with the Audio MIDI Setup app.]
  • Anyway, you select “BlackHole 2ch” in GarageBand/Settings…/Audio-MIDI as your “output device”.
  • Go back to VCV Rack, add an extra VCV “AUDIO” module, and right-click on the top part of the black window to select “BlackHole 2 CH (1-2 in, 1-2 out)” as the audio device.
  • Now you can patch that second AUDIO module’s Left and Right outputs into any module you want, say, a Reverb module, to process it. Or simply patch it directly back into your first AUDIO module’s inputs to listen to it on headphones or speakers. The LEVEL knob on the second AUDIO module does not appear to do anything to the incoming audio, as far as I can tell, so now’s a good time insert a VCA or something to manage the audio level coming from GB.

Sadly, I have not figured out any way to get a clock signal to or from GarageBand. It would be nice if you could make up some kind of backing track in GB and then have Rack play a generative tune on a GB instrument.

Oh. I just noticed that you can have two (or more?) CV▸MIDI modules, with one set to Bus 1 and the other set to Bus 2 to play two melodies on one GB instrument, but I suppose it’s not much different from using a polyphonic MIDI signal on one bus.

If you have problems getting any audio to go through, try checking that the sample rate and block size are the same everywhere.

My main interest was using just the GarageBand instruments in VCV Rack (because some of them sound pretty cool), but there’s no reason I couldn’t record the MIDI on one track in GB and do any arrangements and editing in GB.

Another benefit of having a virtual audio device like BlackHole is that you can record audio from any source, like Youtube, Zoom meetings, live streams, etc. You just have to do it in real time.

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This is called a ‘Multi Output Device’ in Audio/MIDI Setup app. one set to Blackhole and the other to whatever output device you want (speakers/audio device/headphones/…). You van add even more if needed.

Blackhole is awesome. So is Audio/MIDi Setup, once one gets head around how it works.

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25

I prefer to use standalone. The best use I’ve found in DAW is to use the sequencers in Rack to generate MIDI.

I’ve had good luck syncing to Live, using Impromptu Clocked in 48ppq mode. Where you really get into sync hell is if you use VCV host FX in Rack in a DAW because there’s no delay compensation in Rack.

1 Like
26

From cutting my teeth on VCV, I built a hardware rack in the past year and was eager to make a hybrid setup work. I opted for the Expert Sleepers route - ES-9 with ES-5 and Gate/CV expanders.

At first I was finding it difficult to integrate the hardware with VCV standalone on Windows. Clocking/latency and CPU spikes were constant issues. After acquiring a Macbook Pro M1 I noticed a significant improvement, but I was still not satisfied, as I was constantly fiddling with settings and trying to align my ideal workflow with reality. It was incredibly frustrating at times.

I gravitated to the iPad and Drambo, using the Covariant encoders to communicate with the hardware modules, and piping the audio back in to process with the many excellent Auv3s available. This is an excellent setup, very stable with no latency and will be the basis for taking a hardware system live. Sadly, Covariant is no longer available on the app store and the author, Alan Clifton, has disappeared along with his website. I hope he is OK.

Also, while the iPad is a robust platform for music and hardware integration, I was missing a lot of the features of VCV that I took for granted, especially the sequencing. A hardware-VCV hybrid was the point of all of this, after all. I did try MiRack but wasn’t impressed.

So I went back to the Macbook and worked out a system using VCV rack hosted in Bitwig. THIS works amazingly well - I no longer have the timing or CPU issues and everything just clicks. It’s incredibly powerful, so now I can turn on, jam and record without getting caught up in endless reconfiguration. Instead of using the Silent Way VST plugins (which I find to be really clunky and unintuitive), I just pipe everything through a single instance of VCV rack using the Silent Way modules and encoders. It’s simple and it just works (after some initial head scratching).

So now I have one instance of VCV Rack Pro on a bitwig track that provides all the sequencing and logic, including drums. It’s a hugely flexible hybrid system with boatloads of MIDI control, which in turn allows me to completely take the hardware rack in hand and does exactly what I wanted - a perfectly humming hybrid system with tight timing. All the audio is processed on separate Bitwig tracks using the various devices and VSTs. Best of all worlds!

If anyone is having trouble getting a similar system to work I would be happy to provide more details.

This would be an opportune time to again thank Andrew and all the developers of the VCV modules. I hope to give back once I have more time next year. Also big props to Omri Cohen, without whose generous spirit I, and I’m sure many others, would still be rummaging in the dark trying to make sense of all this.

6 Likes
27

not sure I understand, I was referring to how to route audio to both DAW/recording device/whatever and the speakers/headphoes/whatever. This is independent of whether you use it inside a DAW or alongside it (standalone). I never use any DAW, so ymmv

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I’m currently using VCV pro with Bitwig and an ES9. I don’t use silent way.

Can you give me more details about your setup, routings between VCV and Bitwig and silent way ? I did not stress test my system and I’m curious what the benifits could be with ‘silent way’.

This is my setup. The goal is to have bidirectional cv routing between ES9 + Bitwig + VCV Pro.

I currently have VCV pro working in Bitwig with the ES9. From BW to ES9 via HW cv out. From VCV pro in BW via CV to midi (VCV) + from BW to ES9 via MIDI( modulator) and HW cv out. From ES9 to BW via CV in (grid).

Clock → Impromptu Clocked in 48ppq (?) mode

+1 for Omri Cohen VCV tutorials and the Bitwig Mycelium.

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In my case I need to use the Silent Way encoders in VCV rack to communicate with the ES-5 and expanders. I use a single VCV rack instance on Bitwig sending out on audio channels 7&8 of the ES-9, which are used by the ES-5. The main thing to watch for here is that the track outputs must be exactly at 0dB, and the sample rates must the same.

If you are only using ES-9 then silent way isn’t necessary at all, the Bitwig native HW CV out device seems to work fine.

Clocking from Bitwig was a challenge for me, but I am using hardware Pam’s and it is very fussy about receiving the correct voltage (5v). The track gain needs to be reduced (approx -6dB) to make this work properly.

I am not sending any CV back into the DAW, so I can’t help you there.

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30

One of my favorite things about VCV Rack is the wealth of arpeggiation and melody-generation options. LoopMidi has always served me well as a loopback interface on windows but for some reason it was having trouble with sending notes from VCV to FL Studio. I was getting lots of dropped, stuck, or even extra notes. I tried a different loopback software called SBVMIDI (springbeats virtual midi driver) and it works great.

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31

I am running a hybrid system with Bitwig as the host, VCV acting as mixer/modulation/fx/clock/midi to Korg Opsix and Wavestate modules and Eurorack, been a routing journey to say the least :D. For live jamming sessions

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32

I’m trying to use VCV as a VST in Ableton Live, but connecting my MIDI keyboard directly to the VST bypassing and Live, but I’m not having any luck.

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I only use it as a standalone synth (well, I only have a free version, but Cardinal, I think, is also free and it can be used as VST, although I am not sure). Well, I used to do it anyway. Now I am lazy, haha. But I used to record samples or multitrack stems and then I just imported the wav files and that’s all. I remember I quickly learned to disable most of modulation and compression in my patches and also some of the effects… Delays and reverbs better to add in DAW if they are not unique to VCV or maybe they do something that is critical to the sound (like for example gated reverb makes almost anything a drum). So yeah, that’s my way of doing things.

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I find that clock jitter makes Rack mostly unusable in the plugin form (VST2/3 or CLAP - Win11 / Bitwig) when the patch is over or under-sampled to anything other than the host rate.

I’ve never found a solution to this. If there was one, I’d use Rack much more.