A Little “B5” VST Fun

We had a chance to catch up with Ross yesterday and help out with a minor issue he was having with his new B5 VST from Acoustic Samples. It has some nice Hammond organ sounds. If you are a drawbar fan, worth a look. Check out the screenshot below to see it in action on Ross’s Sonic.

That’s my mug in the upper left corner and the good-looking guy under me is Ross. We connected up via Facetime to talk to each other and used Teamviewer to allow me to connect to his Sonic and help finish up the config of the VST. Ross was having an issue that only one manual was able to play the VST.

We found two things that needed to be changed. The first was the overall config of the VST itself. During the install of a VST on OAX, you will get pop up window asking about the number of voices and banks you want. You will want to pick the option for 1 Bank with 128 sounds for most VST installs. The next change we made was to configure a couple user sounds on OAX for MIDI Ch1, MIDI Ch2. and MIDI Ch3. Those are the default channels that the B5 VST expects for Upper, Lower and Pedal. Those channels could be changed on the B5 side but to get Ross up and running we took the easy path and just set up three user sounds mapping to those MIDI channels.

At this point, both the upper and lower manuals and the pedals were able to play the B5. Nice! One last change was to set up the B5 in what is called MIDI learn mode and map the expression pedal on the Sonic so it was able to control the volume levels of the VST.

Coming a little later this week we are going to put up a  new video on how we recorded a few of the Accordion sounds for Pascal. He is still looking for some Drawbar and Vocal demos if anyone has some good ones?