Synth Connectivity and Control with Keys

Gear
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I am a bass player in a praise and worship band at church. A song we recently played had a synth bass part which got me wondering about synth basses. I came here and found this thread.

After reading through all the posts, I was pretty sure I wanted to purchase a Novation Bass Station II. I mentioned all this to a friend of mine (I took lessons from him while I was going through B2B the first time). While taking lessons, he was dropping hints that I would learn a lot if I got more familiar with the keyboard.

This past week, my friend invited me to his studio where he gave a high-level overview of Vital (with Logic) using his Nord keyboard (I don’t know the model). I went home, downloaded Vital, and have been playing with it on and off ever since using the built-in keyboard which is limiting.

I am to the point of wanting to connect my wife’s Korg SV2 to my Mac. Do I need to use a DAW (I have no desire at this point to do any production) or can I just use Vital with the SV2 via USB? Can I control Vital with this setup?

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I also have Vital and it works both as a Standalone and as a DAW plugin. Assuming the SV2 can be used as a midi keyboard the setup you mention should work without a DAW.

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Yep, not all softsynths have standalone apps, but Vital does.

Using it in a DAW does have some other advantages (you can record the MIDI and/or the audio and learn from mistakes or surprise discoveries later, you can apply additional effects, etc etc) but standalone should work fine. Still, it’s useful to think of the DAW as both a recording and a performance tool. Even back in the '80s our band never played live without one.

You could always just buy an inexpensive MIDI controller keyboard as well and you have a perfectly fine instrument with it, your laptop+audio interface, and one or more softsynths.

MIDI over USB is the most common now so you should be fine without a separate MIDI interface.

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