Renowned course and music degree provider Thinkspace Education have published a course about the basics of template building, called "Template in a Weekend".
For the course content, creator Guy Michelmore took the time to host a quite exhaustive interview with me about all things templates. Audio snippets from that very nice interview are interspersed with the course text and it is a great source of information!
Check it out and of course if after working through the course you have any questions or want some guidance, you know where to find me!

After several years with a gigantic number of free updates to Vienna Ensemble Pro 5, the fine folks at VSL have released Vienna Ensemble Pro 6, the next generation of the venerable plugin host and best tool on the planet for building templates.

VE Pro 6 comes with a completely redesigned interface that now uses tabs for all the instances to keep everything in one window.
The list of changes and new features is absolutely gigantic. VSL have really listened to their user base and added a plethora of much-requested features.

Just a small part of the change list (and my personal favourites):
- Instances can be freely reordered and this order reflect in the plugin inside the sequencer.
- The plugin now lists instances sorted per the machine they are on, which is great with lots of slave machines.
- Instances can be coloured and in general the colour selector is much improved. And you can colour multiple items at once, yeah!
- Metaframes can now auto-save and will only do so when no played is active, thus making sure they only save when not in the way.
- Plugin instances can now be raised directly from the host, jumping to the correct instance without having to click "raise". Even greater, this setting can also be automated!
- Folder Support!

And, here is the single most greatest invention:
Channels can now be disabled, preserving their content and settings, but completely unloading them from memory. This allows hosting tons of instruments within VE Pro, ready to be activated when needed. The enabled/disabled state can be automated, thus making it possible to load pre-assigned plugin instances remote into VE Pro as needed. No more "hosting rarely used stuff directly in the sequencer just so it does not consume memory when not needed".

So - should you use it?

Yes, wholeheartedly YES. VE Pro 6 is a great step forward for template building and if the past is any indication, VSL will provide a plethora of updates to polish it to perfection.
Compatibility with existing projects is extremely good. In my tests here, all existing templates connect and disconnect much faster, thus saving quite a lot of time when switching sequencer projects. Performance in idle has been improved quite substantially, with playback/recording performance being in line or slightly better than with VE Pro 5. Since VE Pro now manages graphics resources much better, a substantial improvement can also be seen when switching between instances/plugins.

Tags: VE Pro, website