midi composing with usine?

[amiga909]

Question: how do you integrate midi composing within usine? Where are your beat and melody sequences coming from?
do you:
1- don’t use midi at all or only secondary for making songs? (no option for me, I do almost nothing with audio loops..)
2- use usine’s midi modules + sequencer?
3- import midi files made with cubase, logic, etc.?
4- use usine as vst within cubase+co.?
5- use a midi sequencer vst within usine, like energy, fruityLoops, phrazor, stepchild?
6- use midi sequencer hardware, like akai mpc, doepfer stuff, sequentix P3, genoqs octopus/nemo?
7- something else?

personally:
really love usine's spirit and originality. but what have I done so far with it?
experimenting a lot, did some stuff I have never done so far. it is like rediscovering the original excitement of making music with the computer when I started with orion many years ago. before and until a few years I did live gigs hardware based (many hardware sequencers, synths, later mostly plugins instead of synths).
my current live setup is now bidule and phrazor, and a few hardware fx, and a synth. Works quite well. Only bummer is that phrazor has its instabilities, had some evil shut downs and even worse nasty bugs (like a vst presets in phrazor format get corrupted and u don’t notice it immediately). therefore I lost trust in phrazor (bidule is very stable), a trust that will not be regained coz phrazor is abandoned. Bidule on the other hand hasnt been developed much in the last 12 months.

[bsork]

2, 3 and 4

[senso]

2,3!

[grego mondo]

2 & 3

[amiga909]

thanks for your replies

if possible I'd like to learn more about if and how other musicians use usine for both composition and performance, or for performance mainly. [all about midi purposes]

@grego+senso: about 2+3: so do you use cubase+co. for composition, export midi files and make your live setup with usine? or do you use usine now for both composition and performance, and import midis from old projects?

@bsork: about option 4: you use usine as vst. maybe to bounce midi tracks to usine in realtime?

if I had to choose from the options list: 2,3,4,5,6.
...perhaps you now better understand my confusion

hope the piano roll improvements in v4 will help to make option 5 (piano roll vst like energy/fruity) obsolete for me

tkx for help!

[bsork]

@bsork: about option 4: you use usine as vst. maybe to bounce midi tracks to usine in realtime?

Yes, but I must admit I haven't done much except testing until now (time, time, time...). Can't really remember whether I've tried off-line/non-real time MIDI bouncing yet (I think it's called "Merge MIDI in loop" or something like that in Cubase).

[grego mondo]

I record most of my midi loops, playing it on the keyboard ...
Sometimes I save one of my loop but I prefer to record it live, I like to start a song with nothing and build it in real time ...
I guess i'm affraid to fall into a "push play button set"

[héliouk 6]

1 and 2 for the moment....