The Journey from Mainstage to Gig Performer - Rig Rundown
11/03/24 11:54
I recently took the jump from MainStage to Gig Performer. Here's some commentary and a rig rundown for my Keys Rig, but also how we're using Gig Performer elsewhere for our live work
From MainStage to Gig Performer
In 2016, I started working properly as a keys player and helping to build a Phil Collins tribute show. My outlook for tribute work is demanding - the band *has* to sound like the original records to please fans like me who have a very high expectation, especially for ticket prices of around £20 - £25.
Having seen tribute shows to Dire Straits, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton and Eagles around the time of forming by own shows, I can't deny I wasn't disappointed with Dire Straits, Phil Collins and Eric Clapton. The players didn't play some of the key parts of the arrangements to songs I love correctly and some of the sounds didn't sit. (The Eagles band was great.)
So when I committed to building touring theatre tribute shows, they needed to touch fans more than anything. And discerning fans too - I'm highly HIGHLY critical - so I'm building shows that would please *me*!!
I'm also very aware, from years of watching and listening, that when a band replaces a member, the sound of the band can dramatically change. Huey Lewis has said recently that he quite likes that - a new take on a classic record - but when I go to concert, I largely want to hear it the way I love it. A recent trip to a Mike and the Mechanics tour proved that when a lot of the synths got lost in a bad mix, although Nic Collins on Drums was a treat!!
So when I sat down to listen critically to the records that we'd be performing in Seriously Collins, I knew that just using my Yamaha S90 wasn't going to give me the sound library I wanted. And when we started bringing Genesis tracks into the set, it became even more important to make sure that the sounds were either right, or they'd be played on what the original player would potentially have used.
So I started reading up and was finding things like Wavestation, CP-80, Quadra, Ensoniq, Synclaviers, etc. There was no way my Yamaha S90 would be enough.
At the time, there wasn't a lot of work going on so I had to be efficient with my cash, so I picked up MainStage for about £35 quid and started building the sounds for the songs with my existing plugin libraries - Native Instruments and Korg mostly.
Considering Phil's classic catalogue was largely built in the 80's, Korg M1 and Wavestation were able to get very close to the sounds used on the records. The pianos were largely Kontakt libraries, and NI's Retro Synths had a pretty good Quadra that I liked.
Over time, I picked up Arturia's collection, although I didn't really incorporate them into my rig until it came time to refresh the set.
To be fair to MainStage, which has a poor reputation for reliability - especially when Kontakt is concerned - it performed really well, and I found it very reliable.
It was hosted on a 2012 MacBook Pro - i7 Intel / 16GB Ram. And it was solid until 2021 when that Mac finally gave up - the screen did actually, the computer was still rocking - and I replaced it with a 2015 MacBook Pro i7 / 16GB Ram. Annoyingly, the experience was very different with the newer Mac.
It didn't process the same way so I was finding more CPU usage than before and it just didn't run as 'nicely' as it did on the 2012. But I persevered.
I traded in the Presonus 1810 IO I was using for a Focusrite 18i20 when we found that we needed more output channels - one of Mainstage's jobs was Drum Machine and Click track playback, but we started to perform a 6pc version of the band without Brass so we ran Sax / Trumpet / Trombone tracks from MainStage to mimic the live brass section. It's a good workflow - in terms of engineering, very little on the desk needs to change when MainStage was running Brass verses the live section.
At the same time, I also wanted to minimise the cabling going from my keys rig to the Mainstage Mac so we tried things like powered USB extenders and using the longest USB cable length we could get away with, but it wasn't plain sailing and we had a few shows where MainStage would be a little glitchy.
We also had a couple of shows where someone kicked out the USB for IO, and someone crushed the powered USB cable (which actually wasn't connecting anything at the time) which send the CPU into meltdown!!!
And when MainStage loses the IO, I would switch to the next available IO but, in the process, have to reconfigure all of the instruments - especially Kontact - which seemed to take an age. Then you have to switch it back, which also took another age!!
Now, despite the fact the MainStage itself was actually fairly solid, all of these things started sowing doubt into everyone's minds that MainStage wasn't the reliable platform and it really started to affect 'me' when MainStage kept getting mentioned as a 'we need to fix…".
My biggest with switching to another platform is simply time. My patches for Collins were complex - there's a lot of instruments, and a lot of layers, and controllers doing various things, and then sometimes 6 playback devices for the track and click elements… rebuilding it was going to be mammoth task that I just didn't have time for.
The End is Nigh….
But the straw that broke the camel's back - well, two of them - came at a rehearsal for 2024's tour, when MainStage loaded for day 2's rehearsal and I found that half of my M1 patches needed to be reloaded!! I have backups of each patch, so it's just a case of re-importing in to the concert but it's a pain in the ass to have to do it, and what happens if it happens in a show?
The second was actually to do with our Front of House Engineer, who recently switched to using Gig Performer from Logic Pro to host all of the Production Effects for our shows, where all of the effects were being routed to to our Desk via USB busses.
After a rebuild of the FOH system, again following some system issues, he was finding that the Presonus Studiolive / Gig Performer combo was working solidly.
But for one show, he had to revert to using Logic Pro - he hadn't rebuilt the whole gig profile for that specific show yet - and he found that the whole system actually lagged while using Logic Pro for the FX… and it kinda solidified in our minds how loosey-goosey- Apple's programming is with the Pro(!!!) Audio apps.
Those two things had me jump ship to Gig Performer - that and a free week to do all the rebuilding!! But still, it's time I didn't really want to spend.
Starting with Gig Performer…
So to get going quickly, I had community expert Alistair Begg help me with the initial build and Gig Performer workflow. So we looked over Rig Manager, the MIDI system and MIDI Blocks (my rig runs on 3 Keyboards and 3 MIDI channels being merged and delivered by one MIDI Cable), the Audio system and plugins.
After that, it was fairly easy to build the who concert - copying over the instrument Plugin settings from the MainStage instruments to the Gig performer plugs, and building the mixer routing for the audio paths and backing track element paths.
It is a very different workflow to MainStage. MainStage is a standard audio engineer workflow - channels, inserts and sends. For an Audio Engineer (which I am), MainStage is easy to manage. Gig Performer's workflow is very different - basically blocks and "cables"!! But, once you see it and work with it for 10 minutes, it's just as easy to manage.
Now it wasn't plain sailing in the early shows by any stretch.
I use a Presonus Quantum 2626 for my IO. The reason being that I wanted a Thunderbolt connection rather than USB because Thunderbolt isn't managed by the CPU in the same was as USB - and I wanted to reduce the CPU overhead while using MainStage so I replaced the USB Focusrite with the Quantum.
But we were finding in the early days that Gig Performer would glitch out and crash. Crash reports showed Gig Performer and some of the instruments name checked.
I found myself doing the things I actively hate in forum discussions - blaming the app rather than looking deeper at everything else around audio apps that have an affect on them. I do this all the time in Pro Tools! I still kick myself for it!
Now, because I was originally working with a 2012 Mac on Catalina, I'd got into my head that my Mac needed to be isolated from the outside world and to not update any of the software incase something gets updated and becomes incompatible with the Catalina environment.
That mindset just found its way into the 2015 Mac on Monterey, and these early problems were largely fixed by simply updating all the software - the latest versions of the instruments; the latest version of the OS; the latest version of the Presonus Drivers.
And actually - Gig Performer still glitched out!! But.. the Crash report no longer showed Gig Performer or the plugins as the problem - just the MIDI Server.
Cutting a long story a little shorter, talking to Presonus about the issue and replacing the Quantum as the MIDI IO with an old USB MIDISport has completely transformed the rig and it's not performed a number of shows without any issue.
(Further testing the Quantum, with a loop test, shows that the App receiving MIDI will crash eventually on the 2015 Intel Mac, but doesn't with an M1Pro Mac…. But I'm not really prepared to drop the money on another Mac verses just using a MIDI sport for the MIDI IO!)
So it's been a journey, but I'm finding Gig Performer enjoyable to use - it sounds great, and the visual nature of the app does seem to give a lot more flexibility than MainStage did, especially where my beloved MIDI is concerned.
SERIOUSLY COLLINS RIG RUN DOWN
There's a few things I want from my rigs in 2024:
• They must be neat and tidy on stage
• They must be quick to set up
• They must use minimal cabling across the stage
• It must be nice to play
My rig consists of:
StudioLogic SL88
StudioLogic SL73
Akai MPK MINI
Stay Column stand
Presonus Quantum 2626
M-Audio MidiSport
The SL88 is the main keyboard. The SL73 up top is mainly for riffs, solo-y parts, some pads and Chord Triggers, which I used quite a lot at the beginning of the band when we were actively trying to avoid using additional layers on backing tracks.
The Akai provides a third keyboard where I just ran out of keyboard zones - but it has the advantage of having some CC and transport control on so the transport controls manage the playback of the tracks and one of the CC encoders is linked to come faders in the rigs to bring in or turn down synth layers on songs like No Son of Mine, Mama and In the Air Tonight where I need things to come in and out and various points - alongside the food volume pedal anyway.
Two of the drum pads deal with Patch Up and Down.
The Quantum manages the Audio side and the MIDIsport deals with MIDI In.
(In the near future, it'll also be sending out MIDI commands to trigger lighting scenes… but we're a few months away from that)
The rig has just one cable - the MIDI cable - going to the Mac at side of the stage. My iPhone mirrors my Mac Screen so I can see Setlist Mode and the song I'm on.
The coloured labels are for my dep - making is easy for them to plug everything in without having to think about it or worry.
Korg M1
There's a lot of songs built around the Korg M1. One of the things I did with MainStage was the make each of the patches more efficient in their CPU and RAM usage, so I found myself running as many sounds as I could from as few VSTs as I could - and MIDI is great at that. You can see that I have multiple layers being triggered by the SL88 (on MIDI Ch 4), with some parts being triggered using the SL73 on MIDI Ch. 2. It's all going to the same output, so it's just a case of balancing the parts in the instrument for how we want it to come out on stage. You'll be able to see that the plugins are dealing with zoning, rather than using the SL's built in zoning. Keeping it all in the plugin makes it easier to replace the physical units if need be.
Some of the patches may be doubled up for positive reinforcement, rather than using additional instruments and gain blocks to get the amplitude I need.
Playback and Audio Mixer
The channel routing for the Quantum works like this:
1 Main Keys L
2 Main Keys R
3. Drum machine L
4. Drum machine R
5. Sax
6. Trumpet
7. Trombone
8. Click and Cues
Most of these will just go straight into the audio mixer block, and then routed out to the various required outputs. The Click and the Cues/Announcement playback players are both run into one channel, and balanced using the output fader on the player.
The playback is all linked to the main Gig Performer transport.
All of the main keys parts are sent to channels 1 and 2 - although some will be sub mixed (maybe a couple of times) where I'm needing multiple instruments for building layers. Mama is a perfect example where I have 2 Synclaviers performing a tempo sync'd patch, with a third pad layer for the 3rd verse, which is brought in using a CC encoder. Where the synth itself doesn't have a great main volume system, using the Gain blocks to submix gives good control.
Chord Triggers
I used Chord Triggers a lot in MainStage, using the native effects, but I needed a 3rd party for Gig Performer. RipChord turned out to be a good option, and is actually a really nice little plugin - especially for free. The dev needs a pat on the back there!
Chord Triggers are used a lot in our Can't Hurry Love and Two Hearts, where I can't change patches during songs, and there are lots of different areas for performance parts across the keyboards. Plus, I'm playing string parts with the right hand, requiring the left to do jazzy stuff that it just can't do, so programming in chord triggers to trigger full chords is the way to go.
Vocoding
One of my favourite things about my synths is live vocoding. In the Air Tonight has a lot of vocoding on the original record and when it's not there, it's really missed. This really sets us apart from the other Collins shows that don't go to list level of effort.
The Vocoder keys from the main EP/Synth for the song that's also being triggered by Ripcord, where I need my right hand to play other parts at the same time, and the chords require a constant D in the bass to voice the chords correctly - a hand just isn't able to manage that.
It also use the Vocoder on Who Said I would.
What's cool about this is the routing. I use a headmic for singing BVs, but I also want to use the same mic for Vocoding. As well.
So I have a bus on the mixer set up specifically to send my Vocal to the input of the Quantum for triggering the Vocoder. This way, I can sing and Vocode at the same time. The FOH engineer can just mute the channel when he doesn't want my vocal to come through to FOH.
I don't really have much fun to do with the rack space panels. The Global Rackspace shows the name of the track - useful on the phone screen! The most important thing I want to see is signal from the playback tracks, so I have level meters for each main output. I can see MIDI up in the top right, and audio to the mixer down in the bottom right, but I want to see that the file players are playing.
I'd love to be able to show what Keyboards I'm using - maybe I'll build a couple of key ones out of shapes. The most I could do, I think, was to build a pastiche of a CR78 Drum machine. After all, Phil and Genesis used drum machines a lot so it fits.
It's cool that the toggle switches and lights are linked to the PLAY action, but that's about as fun as I can get with it for the moment. I'd like to get some flashy stuff going. Otherwise, it just shows the state of my Pedal and encoders. I really like what Al Begg has done with his Bass pedal board - maybe I can do something flashy like that in the future.
In conclusion, it was a worthy jump. The biggest hurdle was the learning curve, which was made so much easier with Al's help! After that - it seems really flexible.
My next challenges are to build a Backup Guitar rig to replace the Kemper if it goes down at a Gig. Al's done a fantastic job of replicating his Bass rig into Software so I'm excited to see what I can do with Amp Sim plugs to replicate my Mark Knopfler Kemper rigs. The hardest thing is always the distortions - we'll see whether the chosen plugs will do distortions well. And then I have to build a preamp/FX system for my Resonator.
Our Dire Straits show is currently using MainStage for Track and Click Playback ( only elements that the keys player doesn't have enough hands to deal with ) so rebuilding it in Gig Performer and running an guitar rig alongside it should be no problem.
We'll see where that goes…..!
Thanks for taking the time to read.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/theprotoolsguy/
In 2016, I started working properly as a keys player and helping to build a Phil Collins tribute show. My outlook for tribute work is demanding - the band *has* to sound like the original records to please fans like me who have a very high expectation, especially for ticket prices of around £20 - £25.
Having seen tribute shows to Dire Straits, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton and Eagles around the time of forming by own shows, I can't deny I wasn't disappointed with Dire Straits, Phil Collins and Eric Clapton. The players didn't play some of the key parts of the arrangements to songs I love correctly and some of the sounds didn't sit. (The Eagles band was great.)
So when I committed to building touring theatre tribute shows, they needed to touch fans more than anything. And discerning fans too - I'm highly HIGHLY critical - so I'm building shows that would please *me*!!
I'm also very aware, from years of watching and listening, that when a band replaces a member, the sound of the band can dramatically change. Huey Lewis has said recently that he quite likes that - a new take on a classic record - but when I go to concert, I largely want to hear it the way I love it. A recent trip to a Mike and the Mechanics tour proved that when a lot of the synths got lost in a bad mix, although Nic Collins on Drums was a treat!!
So when I sat down to listen critically to the records that we'd be performing in Seriously Collins, I knew that just using my Yamaha S90 wasn't going to give me the sound library I wanted. And when we started bringing Genesis tracks into the set, it became even more important to make sure that the sounds were either right, or they'd be played on what the original player would potentially have used.
So I started reading up and was finding things like Wavestation, CP-80, Quadra, Ensoniq, Synclaviers, etc. There was no way my Yamaha S90 would be enough.
At the time, there wasn't a lot of work going on so I had to be efficient with my cash, so I picked up MainStage for about £35 quid and started building the sounds for the songs with my existing plugin libraries - Native Instruments and Korg mostly.
Considering Phil's classic catalogue was largely built in the 80's, Korg M1 and Wavestation were able to get very close to the sounds used on the records. The pianos were largely Kontakt libraries, and NI's Retro Synths had a pretty good Quadra that I liked.
Over time, I picked up Arturia's collection, although I didn't really incorporate them into my rig until it came time to refresh the set.
To be fair to MainStage, which has a poor reputation for reliability - especially when Kontakt is concerned - it performed really well, and I found it very reliable.
It was hosted on a 2012 MacBook Pro - i7 Intel / 16GB Ram. And it was solid until 2021 when that Mac finally gave up - the screen did actually, the computer was still rocking - and I replaced it with a 2015 MacBook Pro i7 / 16GB Ram. Annoyingly, the experience was very different with the newer Mac.
It didn't process the same way so I was finding more CPU usage than before and it just didn't run as 'nicely' as it did on the 2012. But I persevered.
I traded in the Presonus 1810 IO I was using for a Focusrite 18i20 when we found that we needed more output channels - one of Mainstage's jobs was Drum Machine and Click track playback, but we started to perform a 6pc version of the band without Brass so we ran Sax / Trumpet / Trombone tracks from MainStage to mimic the live brass section. It's a good workflow - in terms of engineering, very little on the desk needs to change when MainStage was running Brass verses the live section.
At the same time, I also wanted to minimise the cabling going from my keys rig to the Mainstage Mac so we tried things like powered USB extenders and using the longest USB cable length we could get away with, but it wasn't plain sailing and we had a few shows where MainStage would be a little glitchy.
We also had a couple of shows where someone kicked out the USB for IO, and someone crushed the powered USB cable (which actually wasn't connecting anything at the time) which send the CPU into meltdown!!!
And when MainStage loses the IO, I would switch to the next available IO but, in the process, have to reconfigure all of the instruments - especially Kontact - which seemed to take an age. Then you have to switch it back, which also took another age!!
Now, despite the fact the MainStage itself was actually fairly solid, all of these things started sowing doubt into everyone's minds that MainStage wasn't the reliable platform and it really started to affect 'me' when MainStage kept getting mentioned as a 'we need to fix…".
My biggest with switching to another platform is simply time. My patches for Collins were complex - there's a lot of instruments, and a lot of layers, and controllers doing various things, and then sometimes 6 playback devices for the track and click elements… rebuilding it was going to be mammoth task that I just didn't have time for.
The End is Nigh….
But the straw that broke the camel's back - well, two of them - came at a rehearsal for 2024's tour, when MainStage loaded for day 2's rehearsal and I found that half of my M1 patches needed to be reloaded!! I have backups of each patch, so it's just a case of re-importing in to the concert but it's a pain in the ass to have to do it, and what happens if it happens in a show?
The second was actually to do with our Front of House Engineer, who recently switched to using Gig Performer from Logic Pro to host all of the Production Effects for our shows, where all of the effects were being routed to to our Desk via USB busses.
After a rebuild of the FOH system, again following some system issues, he was finding that the Presonus Studiolive / Gig Performer combo was working solidly.
But for one show, he had to revert to using Logic Pro - he hadn't rebuilt the whole gig profile for that specific show yet - and he found that the whole system actually lagged while using Logic Pro for the FX… and it kinda solidified in our minds how loosey-goosey- Apple's programming is with the Pro(!!!) Audio apps.
Those two things had me jump ship to Gig Performer - that and a free week to do all the rebuilding!! But still, it's time I didn't really want to spend.
Starting with Gig Performer…
So to get going quickly, I had community expert Alistair Begg help me with the initial build and Gig Performer workflow. So we looked over Rig Manager, the MIDI system and MIDI Blocks (my rig runs on 3 Keyboards and 3 MIDI channels being merged and delivered by one MIDI Cable), the Audio system and plugins.
After that, it was fairly easy to build the who concert - copying over the instrument Plugin settings from the MainStage instruments to the Gig performer plugs, and building the mixer routing for the audio paths and backing track element paths.
It is a very different workflow to MainStage. MainStage is a standard audio engineer workflow - channels, inserts and sends. For an Audio Engineer (which I am), MainStage is easy to manage. Gig Performer's workflow is very different - basically blocks and "cables"!! But, once you see it and work with it for 10 minutes, it's just as easy to manage.
Now it wasn't plain sailing in the early shows by any stretch.
I use a Presonus Quantum 2626 for my IO. The reason being that I wanted a Thunderbolt connection rather than USB because Thunderbolt isn't managed by the CPU in the same was as USB - and I wanted to reduce the CPU overhead while using MainStage so I replaced the USB Focusrite with the Quantum.
But we were finding in the early days that Gig Performer would glitch out and crash. Crash reports showed Gig Performer and some of the instruments name checked.
I found myself doing the things I actively hate in forum discussions - blaming the app rather than looking deeper at everything else around audio apps that have an affect on them. I do this all the time in Pro Tools! I still kick myself for it!
Now, because I was originally working with a 2012 Mac on Catalina, I'd got into my head that my Mac needed to be isolated from the outside world and to not update any of the software incase something gets updated and becomes incompatible with the Catalina environment.
That mindset just found its way into the 2015 Mac on Monterey, and these early problems were largely fixed by simply updating all the software - the latest versions of the instruments; the latest version of the OS; the latest version of the Presonus Drivers.
And actually - Gig Performer still glitched out!! But.. the Crash report no longer showed Gig Performer or the plugins as the problem - just the MIDI Server.
Cutting a long story a little shorter, talking to Presonus about the issue and replacing the Quantum as the MIDI IO with an old USB MIDISport has completely transformed the rig and it's not performed a number of shows without any issue.
(Further testing the Quantum, with a loop test, shows that the App receiving MIDI will crash eventually on the 2015 Intel Mac, but doesn't with an M1Pro Mac…. But I'm not really prepared to drop the money on another Mac verses just using a MIDI sport for the MIDI IO!)
So it's been a journey, but I'm finding Gig Performer enjoyable to use - it sounds great, and the visual nature of the app does seem to give a lot more flexibility than MainStage did, especially where my beloved MIDI is concerned.
SERIOUSLY COLLINS RIG RUN DOWN
There's a few things I want from my rigs in 2024:
• They must be neat and tidy on stage
• They must be quick to set up
• They must use minimal cabling across the stage
• It must be nice to play
My rig consists of:
StudioLogic SL88
StudioLogic SL73
Akai MPK MINI
Stay Column stand
Presonus Quantum 2626
M-Audio MidiSport
The SL88 is the main keyboard. The SL73 up top is mainly for riffs, solo-y parts, some pads and Chord Triggers, which I used quite a lot at the beginning of the band when we were actively trying to avoid using additional layers on backing tracks.
The Akai provides a third keyboard where I just ran out of keyboard zones - but it has the advantage of having some CC and transport control on so the transport controls manage the playback of the tracks and one of the CC encoders is linked to come faders in the rigs to bring in or turn down synth layers on songs like No Son of Mine, Mama and In the Air Tonight where I need things to come in and out and various points - alongside the food volume pedal anyway.
Two of the drum pads deal with Patch Up and Down.
The Quantum manages the Audio side and the MIDIsport deals with MIDI In.
(In the near future, it'll also be sending out MIDI commands to trigger lighting scenes… but we're a few months away from that)
The rig has just one cable - the MIDI cable - going to the Mac at side of the stage. My iPhone mirrors my Mac Screen so I can see Setlist Mode and the song I'm on.
The coloured labels are for my dep - making is easy for them to plug everything in without having to think about it or worry.
Korg M1
There's a lot of songs built around the Korg M1. One of the things I did with MainStage was the make each of the patches more efficient in their CPU and RAM usage, so I found myself running as many sounds as I could from as few VSTs as I could - and MIDI is great at that. You can see that I have multiple layers being triggered by the SL88 (on MIDI Ch 4), with some parts being triggered using the SL73 on MIDI Ch. 2. It's all going to the same output, so it's just a case of balancing the parts in the instrument for how we want it to come out on stage. You'll be able to see that the plugins are dealing with zoning, rather than using the SL's built in zoning. Keeping it all in the plugin makes it easier to replace the physical units if need be.
Some of the patches may be doubled up for positive reinforcement, rather than using additional instruments and gain blocks to get the amplitude I need.
Playback and Audio Mixer
The channel routing for the Quantum works like this:
1 Main Keys L
2 Main Keys R
3. Drum machine L
4. Drum machine R
5. Sax
6. Trumpet
7. Trombone
8. Click and Cues
Most of these will just go straight into the audio mixer block, and then routed out to the various required outputs. The Click and the Cues/Announcement playback players are both run into one channel, and balanced using the output fader on the player.
The playback is all linked to the main Gig Performer transport.
All of the main keys parts are sent to channels 1 and 2 - although some will be sub mixed (maybe a couple of times) where I'm needing multiple instruments for building layers. Mama is a perfect example where I have 2 Synclaviers performing a tempo sync'd patch, with a third pad layer for the 3rd verse, which is brought in using a CC encoder. Where the synth itself doesn't have a great main volume system, using the Gain blocks to submix gives good control.
Chord Triggers
I used Chord Triggers a lot in MainStage, using the native effects, but I needed a 3rd party for Gig Performer. RipChord turned out to be a good option, and is actually a really nice little plugin - especially for free. The dev needs a pat on the back there!
Chord Triggers are used a lot in our Can't Hurry Love and Two Hearts, where I can't change patches during songs, and there are lots of different areas for performance parts across the keyboards. Plus, I'm playing string parts with the right hand, requiring the left to do jazzy stuff that it just can't do, so programming in chord triggers to trigger full chords is the way to go.
Vocoding
One of my favourite things about my synths is live vocoding. In the Air Tonight has a lot of vocoding on the original record and when it's not there, it's really missed. This really sets us apart from the other Collins shows that don't go to list level of effort.
The Vocoder keys from the main EP/Synth for the song that's also being triggered by Ripcord, where I need my right hand to play other parts at the same time, and the chords require a constant D in the bass to voice the chords correctly - a hand just isn't able to manage that.
It also use the Vocoder on Who Said I would.
What's cool about this is the routing. I use a headmic for singing BVs, but I also want to use the same mic for Vocoding. As well.
So I have a bus on the mixer set up specifically to send my Vocal to the input of the Quantum for triggering the Vocoder. This way, I can sing and Vocode at the same time. The FOH engineer can just mute the channel when he doesn't want my vocal to come through to FOH.
I don't really have much fun to do with the rack space panels. The Global Rackspace shows the name of the track - useful on the phone screen! The most important thing I want to see is signal from the playback tracks, so I have level meters for each main output. I can see MIDI up in the top right, and audio to the mixer down in the bottom right, but I want to see that the file players are playing.
I'd love to be able to show what Keyboards I'm using - maybe I'll build a couple of key ones out of shapes. The most I could do, I think, was to build a pastiche of a CR78 Drum machine. After all, Phil and Genesis used drum machines a lot so it fits.
It's cool that the toggle switches and lights are linked to the PLAY action, but that's about as fun as I can get with it for the moment. I'd like to get some flashy stuff going. Otherwise, it just shows the state of my Pedal and encoders. I really like what Al Begg has done with his Bass pedal board - maybe I can do something flashy like that in the future.
In conclusion, it was a worthy jump. The biggest hurdle was the learning curve, which was made so much easier with Al's help! After that - it seems really flexible.
My next challenges are to build a Backup Guitar rig to replace the Kemper if it goes down at a Gig. Al's done a fantastic job of replicating his Bass rig into Software so I'm excited to see what I can do with Amp Sim plugs to replicate my Mark Knopfler Kemper rigs. The hardest thing is always the distortions - we'll see whether the chosen plugs will do distortions well. And then I have to build a preamp/FX system for my Resonator.
Our Dire Straits show is currently using MainStage for Track and Click Playback ( only elements that the keys player doesn't have enough hands to deal with ) so rebuilding it in Gig Performer and running an guitar rig alongside it should be no problem.
We'll see where that goes…..!
Thanks for taking the time to read.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/theprotoolsguy/
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