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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Carla management |
  
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<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Carla management |
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Carla has a lot of features and capabilities. There is little traditional documentation of Carla available but our experience is that by exploring a little the user immediately gets used to this wonderful software package. You can find a few videos which demonstrate using Carla at https://kx.studio/Applications:Carla
Question:
When just playing songs e.g. during practicing or on stage, do I need to deal with Carla?
Answer:
The answer is NO.
We created two modes of operation
•Sound Designer mode
•Playback mode
The Sound Designer mode is default. The Sound Designer mode is dedicated when the sound design is created. Playback mode is used for practicing or on stage, or when using the playlist.
There is only one difference between these two modes. In
•Sound Designer mode, Carla is visible
•Playback mode, Carla is hidden
In Playback mode when loading a song a small pop-up opens briefly indicating the loading of the ‘Sound Design file’ (carxp-file) by Carla. Please see
When you initially use Composer to open a song file and you are using RealTime audio with JACK and Carla, Carla opens with a default configuration which you can use for your sound design arrangements.
Now it is time to look around. At a first glance you see a rack with 3 elements. These are
•Carla for Composer’s clean channels
•Carla for Composer’s reverb channels
•Carla for Composer’s chorus channels
Advanced Reverb and chorus are new features in Composer 5 which are available for the other interfaces as well, and can be edited with the GraphOverNotes feature and tab.
Example: Add a reverb to the trumpet instrument of the song ‘Oh when the Saints go marching in’
In this example we explain in very details how to add a reverb to the trumpet instrument of the song ‘Oh when the Saints go marching in’ through a reverb VST3 plugin.
First of all, the song needs some preparation for the channel association. Please open the song in Composer and open the Staff/Setup dialog. We have selected the following channel association for the staves
Please notice the Trumpet is allocated to channel 1
Select the JACK driver
Make sure the Sound Designer Mode is selected
Then select "Sound Designer Mode":
In Sound Designer Mode Carla opens and displays the default sound design as this was the selected option. Select the Patchbay tab. Tip: with Ctrl +/- you can zoom in/out the graph.
Our song ‘Oh when the Saints go marching in’ does not use Notation’s internal reverb. Please see the GraphOverNotes / R tab
In order to add a reverb to the Trumpet instrument (remember, it uses the MIDI channel 1) we would like to add a reverb VST3 to the clean channel 1.
Please double click
and a sub Carla for all the clean channels opens.
As part of the default sound design an Audio Gain plugin is used already.
There are great free reverbs VST3 plugins available. Here in this example we use the Dragonfly reverb VST3 plugin which is publically and freely available on Github under the GPL 3 license.
See https://github.com/michaelwillis/dragonfly-reverb
As of this writing the latest version of Dragonfly is 3.2.10. You can download the latest and greatest package from
https://github.com/michaelwillis/dragonfly-reverb/releases
Please use the 64 bit version ‘dragonfly-reverb-3.2.10-win64.zip’
After the download is completed please copy the DragonflyHallReverb.vst3 folder
to the Windows VST3 default folder (C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3)
The next task is in Carla to add this plugin to channel 1.
However, because the VST3 is new to Carla, Carla needs to refresh its list of VST3s. Please see
Carla will scan the complete PC for VST3 files. When this is done the list above is updated and now shows the newly installed Dragonfly Hall and Reverb VST3. Please select it as shown in the next picture:
The added Dragonfly Hall Reverb plugin now shows up in the Carla sub graph might be outside of the viewable area
The next step is to insert the ‘Dragonfly Hall Reverb plugin’ between ‘Audio Input’ and ‘Audio Gain (Stereo)’. For this step the existing connections need to be disconnected.
After the connection are disconnected,
the ‘Dragonfly Hall Reverb plugin’ needs to be connected as such by drag and drop the connections with the mouse
Now double click to the ‘Dragonfly Hall Reverb plugin’ box
and the ‘Dragonfly Hall Reverb plugin’ opens
We now modify the default hall reverb setting for channel 1 while playing the Trumpet instrument by Composer. In our example we found the setting below to best demonstrate the new hall and reverb.
The red squares are the modifications which we make.
As a next IMPORTANT step the settings need to be saved and associated to the .not file of the song for a next usage. Saving is possible in the master Carla (not in the sub Carla which is for the clean channels only). When saving all settings of the sound configuration are saved like the layout of the graph, Audio Gain and in particular the hall and reverb settings of Dragonfly
The sound design file (carxp)-file is saved to the Notation family directory’s Sound_Design folder
(C:\Users\Public\Documents\Notation_5\Sound_Design)
At this stage the sound design is saved, however, a further step is required that the song’s .not-file ‘Oh_When_The_Saints_Go_Marching_In_Demo.not’ contains the information of the associated sound design (carxp)-file.
Please see the next section of this documentation Sound Design Management.
Composer tries to perform the configuration of Carla automatically. However, in certain cases Composer determines that a configuration can only be done manually. In this case the steps are show here
Composer opens Carla for the configuration. If the configuration canot be performed automatically, Composer opens Carla for configuration. If this is the case then
Click to one after another
1.Configure Carla. The Carla Settings pops-up
2.OK to the Carla Setting pop-up (does the pre-configuration)
3.In the Composer ‘Carla configuration’ pop-up do OK (Composer does the final configuration for its needs)
