I feel like I’m starting to better understand how to set up and take advantage of the control mappings at the bottom left of the MG3 window. That’s extremely cool. But I find I run out of available slots, even in the three-row view with its nine, and I don’t know how to add (or perhaps reveal) any more. Are there more slots available? If so, how would one get to them, and how many are supported in total?
Having since learned the proper name of the Patchbay, and having had a little more time to work through some of my emergent control ideas, I’m revisiting this topic here.
I’m still hopeful that we can eventually see an expandable Patchbay that might feature more connections. I love the convenience of being able to accept an incoming control message and then affirmatively invert or force latching, and of course then to distribute it to one or more handles and parameters in the MG3 UI. It’s an architecture so elegant it makes me want to use it.
And what’s happening there, is that I’m becoming interested in using MG3 for purely audio channels and even whole patches–not just for the MIDI-note driven instruments. Testing this so far has been extremely encouraging and illuminating, but also it has exposed another limitation that may prove even more significant than the size of the Patchbay: the fact that the grid of exposable plugin parameters for an MG3 plugin instance is limited to four.
So for a practical example, I have long been invested in IK’s AmpliTube landscape, but AT doesn’t have a delay long enough for “Frippertronics” style soundscaping (think 5-15 seconds of delay). Lovely, so I plop an instance of AT into channel 1, and an instance of SoundHack’s ++delay plugin into the Master channel. Now, for control, that AT plugin has the four spots for exposable parameters, but if I want to use my expression pedal both as a volume pedal and as a wah, that immediately occupies all four parameter slots (enable volume, volume level, enable wah, wah sweep), leaving nothing left for things like boost, amp channel switching, modulation, etc. Even if I have available Patchbay connections, I’ve run out of space on the plugin itself.
I’ve since figured out that I can end-run around this problem a little bit, if say I throw a utility plugin before AT and use that for my volume pedal; that frees up two connections on the AT plugin. And of course I could chunk things up further still, so that my wet effects are in another plugin that follows AT, so that I wouldn’t feel the need for more than four connections for any given plugin.
But AT itself is, at least potentially, an end-to-end plugin in itself, and it would be great if MG3 could expose up to all 16 of the automation parameters it presents. I’ve no doubt that other “large scale” plugins might similarly beg for more connection points.
Anyway, I started thinking about all this, and for me at least, the idea of MG3 as a deliberate plugin host and orchestrator for live use would seem to be pretty appealing. I know @JamO is focused on the Windows beta right now, but for the future I would think that if MG3 could be expanded with:
- An expandable Patchbay
- Expandable plugin connect grid
- Response to Program Change messages
It would be a pretty formidable choice as a live plugin host and orchestrator in the way I find Audiobus so powerful on iOS.
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