dab

I'm not a keyboard player but I believe that MainStage 2 will do what you need. You can playback tracks from within Mainstage 2. You don't need another application like (iTunes, GarageBand, or Logic). You do it by creating instrument track channels that have an instrument on them called Playback. You can synch multi-track stems from Logic if you want. The only thing i am unhappy with at the moment is that the bus/send architecture is still buggy and it only supports 8 busses even though there are 32 of the listed. If you only want to playback a stereo backing track and use your keyboards and maybe a mic I think Mainstage 2 will work for you. I am a guitarist/singer and I want to use Mainstage 2 as a combination front-of-House mixer, a Monitor mixer, and a multi-track playback engine. I have it doing all of that but if I copy/paste/duplicate a finished song so I can reuse all of my mappings of sends/auxes the new song/patch comes up with the sends all turned off and the only way to make them work is to delete them and re-add them which means you have to remap each control on the mixer view. trying to get a 100 songs set up is going to take forever doing it like that. If they fix that and give us more than 8 simultaneous send/aux busses then I would be a very happy camper. By the way, if you do want to use iTunes there are applescripts that come with Mainstage 2 that will connect the two together so that you can control iTunes from within Mainstage 2. Someone has also written a set for GarageBand that you can download off the web. Also, FYI Logic Studio has a ton more instruments in it that are not in the Express version. Probably worth the price to a keyboard player to upgrade even if you don't use Mainstage. Hope that helps you. Dave

Hold the Phone! Any sends you put on a channel (say a monitor send in the "Pre" setting) goes inactive if you duplicate the patch to create another patch. Meaning it won't work at all in the duplicated patch (at least I have exhausted everything I can think of and can't get them to work). The only way that doesn't happen is if you put them at the concert level which of course means you can't adjust settings per patch.

Thanks that's what I ended up doing. Pro Tools provides a pan control for every send so i know it shouldn't be that big of a deal and the busses in Logic and Mainstage are already stereo so I can't imagine why they didn't do this already (or that seemingly no one has complained about it before me). Anyone trying to use Mainstage for anything more than a keyboard player or some other "individual" like a guitarist would stumble on this right away as I did. It works but you only have eight send buses to work with for everything (unless someone knows how to make more than 8 work) so 2 monitor mixes uses up 4 sends. I am using multiple backing track stems (i.e. PLAYBACK channels) and I mix those down to 3 subgroups (Drums, Music, Vox) which is 3 more sends we're already up to 7. How bout a couple of effects sends? Ooops....thats a total of 9 so I am one send bus short. How bout mixing a 4 piece band so you want 4 monitor mixes? That's 8 sends all by itself so forget effect sends or sub mixes. Mainstage is a GREAT idea but for serious work that's all it is at the moment....just an idea. Oh yeah. Did I mention that if you duplicate a patch (to create the next song) All of the sends are disabled? the only way I have found to get it to work is to remove all of them and re-add them. The byproduct of this is that you lose all of your mappings to the UI. Classic Catch 22. I sent a bug report to Apple for this but I haven't heard anything back from them. Do they even support this product? Color me highly disappointed.

It all depends on where you create the Auxs. I have begun creating all channels, auxes, etc. in a "template" patch instead of at the concert level. By doing this everything is available for mapping and I am pretty sure that each "instance" of the patch template will retain its settings. When I want to create a patch I just click on the template patch and do a "duplicate" then modify and rename the duplicate.

Okay I have spent the better part of a day trying to figure out how to pan a send for a stereo monitor mix. What am I missing? BTW, zilch in the Help Resources as far as I can tell on this and many standard concerns regarding using the product in a live setting. Gotta just be me not looking in the right place. Thanks!