Hi, there is no External setting on ESP to have one other VSTi under ESP control.

I play on stage with an Arturia Keylab Mk3 keyboard and ESP is host on Camelot Pro.

For some songs, i use also Arturia VSTi, host too in Camelot Pro, that's Camelot that manage what i play, not ESP.

The more easy to have other VSTi under control is to use a VST Host like Camelot Pro, VST Live, Gig Performer, Main stage ... at your tasrz for using one of them.

Here is my video on that topic : Yamaha ESP: playing on stage with ESP, Camelot Pro and the Arturia Keylab is easy (English & Sub)

https://youtu.be/LGm3ioD-7bs

Hope it's help.

Ah. I had thought that, if you loaded your Montage M setup into ESP, your Performances would exactly mimic what you had set up in hardware, except for the listed limitations (e.g. no seamless sound switching, no use of parts 9-16, no individual output settings)... I guess we have to add no external MIDI zones to that list!

I was trying to most closely duplicate the Montage/MODX workflow, specifically in this case, where tapping on a Live Set entry could include a combination of internal and external zone sounds, hoping it would work just the way it works when tapping on those Live Set entries on the board itself. So this is a caveat that I think is worth noting that I had never seen mentioned. If any of your Montage/MODX M performances include external zones of any sort, and you want to have the same Performances when running ESP, all those internal/external sound combinations will have to be manually recreated in your computer by using ESP in conjunction with the MIDI zoning capabilities of your host.

I wonder if that's worth posting about on ideascale. At a minimum, if they don't think that's a functionality worth adding to ESP (or until such time as they do), they could at least add "no MIDI zoning" to their list of unsupported features. 

As useful as the ESP is it is still a 'work in progress' and more of an 'alpha test' level than even beta in our opinion. That isn't meant to denigrate what it can do. 

But there are still some gaps to be filled by future releases and we have to think that Yamaha already knows about most of them and is feverishly working to fill them. Take heart in knowing that since ESP is pure software the filling in of gaps can be done via updates. We haven't seen any indication that there might be hardware (cpu, instruction set, etc) changes needed such as the support for extended array instructions for ESP to work at all.

There are TWO different versions of ESP - one for Montage M and a separate one for Modx M. Each ESP version will only work with its own instrument version so if you have both instruments you need to have both ESPs installed.

The ESPs also have no knowledge as to what other hardware exists or where it exists. That info needs to come from the DAW itself in terms of routing data between 'external' devices since all devices are external to the ESP even if they reside on the same PC.

Wonder if the reason why the feature doesn't exist is because the bundled version of Cubase doesn't have what it takes to define multiple MIDI outputs (sends) for a plugin.  As a standalone maybe there's more flexibility (not sure ... and MIDI is a bit in flux in Windows at the moment).   Ideally ESP would have two MIDI outputs (not channels, but 2x full 16 channel bus) where one MIDI input/output would represent the digital (USB) bus and the other would represent the 5-pin DIN bus.  And so you could use your DAW to route MIDI of the two input/outputs to different places and if within ESP you configured it for "5-pin" (as you could in the real hardware) it would go to one virtualized output and if configured for "USB" it would go to the other virtualized input/output.  While retaining that "USB" has multiple ports and one of those ports forwards to the other virtualized port just like the real hardware does.

There's a lot of functionality in the hardware that ideally would be covered by ESP if you setup the virtualized MIDI in/out bus (two sets) correctly.  You should more or less have the ability to duplicate everything and any audio interface with an external MIDI in/out would serve as the 5-pin DIN or you could, if you want, route that to just another virtual bus in the DAW.

I (don't know, but) still think the sticky point is going to be the capabilities of what Cubase AI can do or not do with respect to MIDI routing in and out of plugins.  Maybe I'm wrong. Steinberg has an opportunity to just make it work, though.   Multiple sends and the ease of setting this up seems to be a known limitation of the lower SKUs.

For now you may need to use something like Camelot Pro or Cantabile to wrap their stuff around ESP and do double work in setup if you plan on using Liveset, the actual hardware, and external gear in addition to, at other times, also using the ESP setup.

Not ideal.

Posted by: Pete

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The ESPs also have no knowledge as to what other hardware exists or where it exists

Right, but neither does the Montage/MODX (M). When you create a zone on the hardware boards, all it knows is stuff like what Program Change to send on which channel, and then which keys should be active for triggering whatever device it sent them to. It doesn't "know" what device that is, or even whether or not any such device is actually connected at the moment... but neither does it need to. It may be sending to Pianoteq as in my example... but that info is unknown by and  irrelevant to the Yamaha keyboard.

Picking up from Jason's post, I was hoping ESP-M would have a virtual port for external devices, mirroring the function of the USB MIDI Out of the hardware, which could be configured at least to send MIDI out of one of the computer's USB ports (i.e. to send that MIDI to attached physical MIDI devices). This relates to my initial question about whether one could use an iPad as a MIDI destination... conceptually, this gets a little confusing (at least to me) because the iPad can function as both a USB host and a USB device in different circumstances. So I was wondering if/how this could work... before discovering that ESP doesn't support zoning to other MIDI devices at all.

I figured it was less likely that ESP could address other MIDI apps running on the same computer, but Yamaha are clever people, it wouldn't shock me to have learned that they built in a way to do it; or that they built in a way to do it at least if your host were Cubase or Steinberg VST Live (or Camelot Pro, who they have worked with in the past). As Joel mentioned, one could configure Camelot to give you whatever combination you want (as you should be able to do with any such host), but one theoretical solution to this issue would be if or more of these hosts could recognize the ESP/Montage Performance Zone data when a Performance is invoked, and would then automatically honor those routings. So for example, if a Performance includes sending a Program Change and Note On/Off data to whatever external device is set to respond to MIDI channel 2 the host would recognize that, and route that MIDI to whatever VST you had set to respond to channel 2. So if your hardware Montage/MODX-M was set to trigger Pianoteq externally over MIDI channel 2, the host running ESP--if able to see/recognize Montage/MODX zoning parameters--could theoretically create the same result, as long as you likewise had the host set to be hosting Pianoteq set to respond to channel 2. (I guess for ESP to do this all by itself, ESP would have had to include some basic VST hosting functionality of its own, e.g. essentially a small subset of VST Live... but that's not necessarily beyond the realm of possibility either.) 

Jason's thoughts about emulating multiple MIDI connections (mirroring the 5-pin and USB MIDI connections of the hardware, including the ability to let the device on one route data to the other) is another interesting way to look at a possible solution.

If ESP could run standalone (not in a host), I could imagine running ESP and virtually connecting its MIDI Out to a host which held the various plug-ins you'd want its zones to trigger. That would be clean. But running ESP inside a host (as required) while also sending its own MIDI data to some other host would be, if not impossible, is at least enough to make my head spin.

I also think part of the wall you can run into is that the keyboard players in big enough groups to have a crew to transport and setup your gear likely already use another system to deal with VSTi routing and such so having ESP integrate all of this is seen as niche. 

Gather your friends, pitchforks, and torches, and advocate for the 'little" guys/gals on Ideascale.  I think it's an interesting problem to solve but Yamaha hasn't been against having the consumer do some of the heavy lifting when there was another (albeit less convenient) way to get the job done.

Guess if you have the VSTi host handle all of the routing then you could setup the host's routing so it would be highly leveraged between using the hardware tone generator (full keyboard hardware) vs. ESP.  It'd be different than the pure hardware way.  You'd involve the PC (or laptop or tablet) for both cases.  Still maybe a pain but minimal differences between the two environments.

Have to do something in the meantime.  One could also spin this as being "fun".  The engineering side of being a keyboardist.  I tend to think of it for myself as "choreography" (planning, logistics, setup) rather than a more technical label.  The games we play ...  

Still, these are fairly nice problems to have considering ESP wasn't an option before.  This is the introduction of a new thing none my previous hardware keyboards had.  So, seriously, it's good to maintain some perspective.