I spent this past week building my composing rig and template at home after moving back from the US where I was studying. The whole Vienna Ensemble Pro (VEP) and Lemur thing was very new for me (I had neither before) but I am extremely with the result. Here is an overview of the system. If people are interested in creating a similar setup please let me know and I will try to make a walkthrough.
The Lemur part is relevant even if you don't plan on using VEP.
Before I start I also want to thank Mihkel Zilmer. The template he shares as part of his Lemur tutorial series (
https://youtu.be/BqYR7_TMj7E) has been the basis of my own template. Visually they still look extremely similar but under the hood they are very different. I wanted a system that is at the same time very stable, responsive and flexible.
So, here is a screenshot of my Lemur template:
The screen is divided in three main sections:
The upper left section controls the visibility of my Reaper folders. The instrument groups correspond to the MIDI tracks. The two other folders are the audio returns and the mix groups. The button at the upper left corner is a switch that controls the behavior of the other buttons. It can either show the folder and hide the others, or add the selected folder to those already visible. Finally there is a button to hide all the empty tracks among the currently visible tracks (extremely useful!) and another button to show all the tracks. This means that at any moment I have a very limited number of tracks visible on my screen and I can still very easily access any track. The current selection is always preserved when the visibility is changed.
Under the visibility section there is a bunch of faders for the most often used MIDI CCs.. If you already have physical MIDI faders you might want to replace these by something more useful ( which I will do).
Finally the right side of the screen is the core of the Lemur template: it's an auto-updating articulation selector that works in tandem with the wonderful Reaticulate scrip by Tack (thank you
) (
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=200022). The list of articulations is automatically updated every time I click on the corresponding MIDI track in Reaper or scroll through the tracks using the two arrows at the top. Clicking on an articulation will obviously select it VEP (or Reaper if you don't use VEP) through Reaticulate.
The tracks are setup to be automatically rec-armed when selected. This means that I can always keep them minimized, gaining a lot of screen real estate. Also, Reaticulate allows me and Lemur to switch between all the articulations of an instrument even if they are in different patches. If you look at the first screenshot you will see that I can have almost 40 articulations immediately available at the tip of my fingers (in this case Spitfire Symphonic Strings).
Having all the articulations available at all times is great but it means they take some time to load. That's when Vienna Ensemble Pro enters the picture. It allows me to have all the instruments constantly loaded and to switch projects in an instant. Because the VEP instances are decoupled it also means that the Reaper project size stays very small and auto backups are unnoticeable. In my case VEP runs on a custom built PC connected to my Mac through a gigabit ethernet connection, but it could also run on the same computer if it was powerful enough.
So this is my current setup. It has been rock solid since I finished it and it's extremely responsive even if my Samsung Tab A (which runs Lemur) talks to my computer through wifi.
Please let me know if you have any questions or if you really want a walkthrough on how to recreate the same setup. I also have a few scripts that make the template creation much faster in Reaper and I would be happy to share them (for example a script to automatically increment audio outputs and disable midi outputs for the existing sends on a track).
Lemur, VEP, Reaper Orchestral Template/System
i can see the articulations in the midi clip and B
Linear Mode
