Should I buy Mainstage?

I recently bought logic express9 as an upgrade from garageband and am now thinking of upgrading to logic pro, mainly to get mainstage.

I currently use 2 keyboards in a live situation (mostly due to inability to swap patches), but figure I might be able to cut down to one using midi with mainstage for splits and swapping between patches using the software 'midflight'.

Is this the sort of thing it's useful for? What would I use to play backing tracks? Can they still play out of logic, while mainstage is open, or would I have to use itunes?

Couldn't I just use logic without mainstage to do all this?

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

MainStage is designed to be used live whereas Logic is not really designed for live use as its primary purpose......though it can definitely be used live. MainStage was created to bridge this particular gap.

I agree with Dave...I think MainStage 2 is just what you're after SO LONG AS your system has some decent specs i.e. at least 4GB ram and a nice fast dual core processor. From what you've described, MainStage seems almost custom-designed for your particular needs i.e. keyboard player with backing tracks (and vocals??) You don't provide enough info as to why you'd need additional software (Midflight) for splits and patch changing but MainStage has been designed with these very things in mind and I'd be very,very surprised if you actually needed the extra software because MS didn't do what you needed it to do. I don't personally need or use the MS file-playing plugin but from what I've heard, it'll do the job just fine. And you can edit an existing template to provide the onscreen controls that you need or you could build one from scratch (which is what I've done) in order to give yourself an unparalleled degree of creativity in terms of what you want onscreen.

Finally, (and this isn't a criticism at all) but I think you should have a closer look at MainStage and its specs because it sounds as if you haven't really looked into it all that closely.....I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what it can do.

I use mainstage for Church and even have things like Kontakt loading some heavy samples for piano and Vienna strings and it works great.

My system is a few years old macbookpro it has a core 2 duo 2.33ghz cpu and 3GB of ram and works perfect (4gb wont work in this model)

JUst dont load dozens of p[atches up just what u need and run it in a clean user with the wifi off and youll be fine on a lower spec system.

Buy it

You use the playback facility in Mainstage to play your backing track.

In the previous version, you had to use quicktime or itunes, which is fiddly live, as you flick between aplications.

Set you patches up as songs, so when you change patch, it has the song embedded in playback.