Orion Pro And GPO Tutorial

Using GPO with Orion Pro 5.8
by Joseph Burrell

Welcome to the Garritan Personal Orchestra - Orion Pro 5.8 Tutorial. This tutorial will breifly describe how to quickly get started using GPO with Synapse Audio's Orion software.

A PDF file of this tutorial is available HERE (3.1 MB Download)

1. Open Orion Pro 5.8.

2. Select File, then New to start a new song.

3. To begin using GPO within Orion Pro, click on Insert in the toolbar and select VST Instrument, then select Garritan Personal Orchestra VST.

4. You will notice immediately that 8 VST/Audio output channels appear in the mixer.

5. The next preferred step is to click on the options button on the GPO VSTi, select Config.

6. Next, you will be presented with your automation/control options for this VSTi. For GPO to work properly within Orion, you need to select Midi CC control.

7. Close the Configuration window when you are done to return to the VSTi panel.

8. Next, load 8 instruments into the Garritan Personal Orchestra VSTi instrument. For precise audio level control it would be wise to set each instruments audio output to a separate channel. Also, unless you need to do otherwise, leave each instrument in its default midi channel as they are assigned (1-8.)

9. When you are ready to begin entering notes, click on the piano roll button.

10. Each channel/instrument is controlled from one central piano roll. So select the channel you wish to begin editing by clicking on the channel button in the lower right hand corner of the piano roll.

11. Next, go ahead and turn off the ‘snap to grid’ option by clicking on the grid in the lower right hand corner of the piano roll.

12. And since we are using Orion as a sequencer not a pattern tool you need to extend the length of the pattern to 999. Double-click on the track length to do this.

13. Next, enter, your notes normally into the piano roll.

14. When you have finished, you will probably want to edit controller data for those notes for optimum results with GPO. To do this, simply click on the Event (EVT) button in the lower right hand corner of the piano roll.

15. This will bring up your controller options for this VSTi (GPO.) If you had not changed the Automation/Control options for the GPO VSTi, there would be much fewer controllers listed here. Select the controller you wish to edit (for this example, midi CC# 1, modulation.)

16. Next, just draw in your modulation curves like normal.

17. Note: There is a nice Humanize feature in Orion Pro. To use this feature, select specific notes or don’t select any to humanize the entire track, and then select Edit, Humanize.

18. The Humanize feature gives you 3 options for humanizing the midi note data. You can humanize the velocities, the note start times, the note end times. Select the ones you wish to edit, and click Enter.

19. That’s the basics of the piano roll in Orion Pro. If you want to enter notes for other channels, just select the appropriate channel from the channel list in the lower right hand corner of the piano roll.

20. Let’s assume you are satisfied for now. The next step would be to add effects to your mix. Minimize the GPO VSTi so that the mixer shows on screen (if you try to close it, it will warn you that doing so will cost you all your hard work.)

21. Remember that we assigned each instrument of GPO to a separate mixer channel. This will afford you greater control during mixdown. You have 8 mixer channels in the mixer for each of the 8 instruments in the GPO VSTi. There are 2 insert effects for each of the 8 channels as well as 4 master effects that can be applied separately.

22. To add a track specific effect, just right click on the insert panel in the mixer channel you wish to add the effect to. Select New Effect, then select the VST or Direct X effect you wish to add.

23. The next step is crucial if you want to hear the effects of the effect you just applied to the channel. Click on the button next to the insert to turn on the effect. To turn it off if needed, just click the button again.

24. To add a master effect, just click on Insert from the top toolbar in Orion Pro, then click on the VST effect you want to open.

25. Next, click on View. Then select Master FX panel.

26. This will bring up the Master FX Insert panel.

27. To add the VST effect you just opened to the Master FX panel, just click on the first dropdown box, and select it from the list.

28. There are no additional steps to turn on the master effects, however, at the top of each VST/Audio channel in the mixer, you can adjust the volume/level of the master effects bus using one of the 4 knobs present there. The # assigned to the knob is the same as the # of the master effect it will edit.

29. The last important step to using GPO and Orion Pro, is to render the file. Just click on File, Stream to Wav.

30. Select the output file properties, click OK.

31. Now select your files destination and file name, and click Save.

There are some cool features in Orion that you don’t find in most sequencers, like realtime auto-chord creation, an appregiator (sounds great with the harp), and other non-destructive edits that can be made on the raw midi data. I hope you found this information helpful.

I hope this helps and is beneficial to all you Orion users out there.