Hello all. Im a proud new owner of VDL2. Its my new favorite friend.

I am trying to input pit perc parts and wish to use multiple sounds on the same staff-like concert bass, cymbals, congas etc.  Right now my staff has Layer 1 outputting to MIDI ch 11 (concert bass recieving MIDI ch 11 in kontakt), Layer 2 outputting to MIDI ch 12 (earth plate MIDI ch 12 in kontakt) etc.

Is there an easier way to do this? I am using 4 MIDI channels and 4 separate sounds in kontakt per staff and its getting a bit unwieldy.

Dell Inspiron
Pent M1.73
1 gig ram
VDL2
Finale 2006
Kontakt 2.0

In Finale, that is essnetially your best option.  That is one of the few ways that Finale seems to have a bit of a one up on Sibelius in that you don't necessarily need a program such as Kontakt 2 to use multiple sounds on the same staff.

The only drawback is that you are limited to 4 sounds per staff.  While this is normally enough for your run of the mill writing, you might need a whole plethora of instruments for some multi-percussion pieces.

Kontakt 2 would be your best alternative to the method you're using.  It's features are much more powerful than those in Finale, and you will be capable of loading 128 sounds in each ";bank";, each of which is assigned to its own MIDI channel.

I hope this helps a little.  I'm sure that I have left out some other helpful tidbits, but this should get you started.

Best of luck!

Yes - Kontakt 2 is probably the best way to accomplish what you're doing. And since you already have it, I think the answer you're looking for is right under your nose. Rather than messing with all those nasty Layers in Finale, simply load separate INSTRUMENT BANKS, each with their own midi channel, into the K2 rack (rather than individual instruments). In K2, click the ";load/save"; button, and select ";new instrument bank";. When you open this bank, you'll see there are several ";program slots"; (128 of them). Just drag your VDL2 instruments (.nki) from the browser (the column on the left) into the varying slots in that bank. Then all you have to do to switch between instruments that are loaded into the bank slots is simply send a program change from Finale by either using the MIDI tool, or assigning a program change to a text attribute's playback options.

If you do a quick search in the forum for ";program change"; or ";instrument bank";, you'll probably find some more helpful info.