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New to MainStage 3.................Help!!!!!!


jerrydpi

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I have never had a need for MainStage 3 (as I haven't played live in a while), but now I need it :)

 

 

I want to be able to have quick access to 30 Songs, so that's where I need help.

 

 

I have a 88 key controller, and I have to play bass, a keyboard/organ, and strings/horns over the keyboard.

 

I know how to assemble all the various instrument tracks (including the split points for the various instruments).

 

So my questions are:

1) What is a Concert?

2) What is a Patch?

3) What is a Performance?

4) Once I have the sounds/instruments and split points for a Song, and I want to save it by the name of the Song, what am I saving it as (a Patch, a Performance, a Concert), and where is it saved?

5) How will I be able to call up each individual Song quickly?

Edited by jerrydpi
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Really, this is the best answer.

Rough hierarchy:

1)2)3)

> Concert is your main project. you can have only one concert open.

-> Set is a collection of patches

--> Patch is collection of sounds/ch strip setting, whatever.

 

You can make settings at ANY level which will than affect everything that's under it. (Concert level is active everywhere, set affects all patches inside it, patches are local)

 

3) I don't know what a performance is. What is a performance?

4) I usually had "Song" set up as a "set" and different parts of one song as "patches"

 

5) everything is recalled via program changes.

 

6) I moved to logic :) If you do playback or need tempo synced stuff or just don't want to bother with manual changing of sounds, go to Logic. Anything arrangement or time-based is better in logic.

Mainstage is better for quickly picking a sound from a collection of sounds (like a workstation synth)

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Yep. I am not gigging since a few years, but if I were, I'd be using Mainstage. But that's just me. Back in the day I used to have a rack full of 80's synths and routed it all through a program change multiplexer that would receive one program change and echo it out to all my keyboards, and also enforce various zones and layer setups, on a patch by patch basis that I could easily call up for each song or in the middle of a song.

 

That is how I like to work, and Mainstage does all that and 100x more...mainstage is a dream gigging setup for me. But I am not really interested in live midi sequencing, if I were I'm not sure what I'd do..might still use Mainstage, but some kind of third party midi sequencer plugin inside it. For backing tracks I highly recommend just playing MP3's anyway....in MainStage, logic or an iPod, doesn't matter. Keep it simple.

 

If you're into live midi creative artistry on the stage, then MainStage is probably not the right tool...

 

Mainstage seems to have mostly gained the attention of worship players for some reason. A lot of the resources on the web are worship players trying to sell MainStage presets and concert layouts, etc..

 

There used to be no real competitor to MainStage on the mac, but now there is at least one competitor product, much more expensive, Gig Performer. On the PC you have Cantabile mainly.

 

As Ploki already said, I am not sure what you mean by performance. Mainstage has something called "sets"

 

You can group patches into sets (which are kind of like a folder), for any reason you like...and sets into a concert. A concert is the entire MainStage project file. Me personally I would probably use one concert per actual gigging set. I can load the concert in between sets in the gig. Then I would probably use a MainStage "set" for each song, and within each of those, the various patches of the song...if there are more then one.. But there is no hard and fast rule. Whatever works for you.

 

Mainstage preloads all the samples when you load the concert, so you can switch between patches instantly.

 

You can put channel strips at the concert level...and those channel strips will appear in all sets and patches. For example, you could put a single instance of a reverb plugin at the concert level. Then when each patch is called up, it would include that aux channel and the specific patch co0uld send to it. If you have 100 songs, you'd only be using one reverb plugin instance and always with one global common setting.

 

You can do the same thing at the Set level.

 

You can also make aliases of channel strips in order to share any one instrument channel setup between several patches, so they would all be using the same instrument setup.

 

MainStage has a lot of power and flexibility and impossible to summarize all that is is capable of in a few forum posts. Read the manual, experiment, check out the various worship oriented MainStage help sites, you can learn stuff there. Read through this forum to learn stuff. I think there might be some third party video tutorials out there. Lots on You tube. Come here with specific questions.

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Really, this is the best answer.

 

I moved to logic :) If you do playback or need tempo synced stuff or just don't want to bother with manual changing of sounds, go to Logic. Anything arrangement or time-based is better in logic.

Mainstage is better for quickly picking a sound from a collection of sounds (like a workstation synth)

 

 

In every Song I'll be playing at the live gig, I have no need for changing sounds on the fly because the correct sounds are already in their proper place within their zones on my 88 key keyboard (Nektar LX88).

 

Once a Song is completed, I can load a new Song/Project in about 10 seconds from my MBP's internal SSD.

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