It has been a while since I started to use Gig Performer but I finally wanted to share my experience with it so far.
I play guitar in a spanish U2 tribute band, and always loved multi effects and guitar gear.
My first device was a Zoom 505, and have tried almost everything in the market up to Fractal devices, where I was mainly using lately with the U2 tribute.
I actually got a couple of weird hardware issues with a Fractal FM3 device that made me restart it in the middle of a show, so at some point, I decided to give a computer-based rig a try.
In a previous band, many years ago, I used Ableton Live with some vstis for keyboards, but never considered to use it for guitar.
Another thing that made me make the step, is that we are playing backing tracks and clicks for the show, and were mainly used B.Beat device for that.
Another problem with the old setup was that my guitar rig was not really synchronized with B.Beat, so it basically had the same setlist order, and used a pedal to just play the backing track and video. If we wanted to skip a song, or just choose an specific one in a sound check, I couldn´t just change the patch on my FM3 and make it change in B.Beat, as it doesn´t have midi in with program changes or anything.
So, after a couple of weeks with MainStage, I couldn´t make it work properly without creating a hell of buses, and I really liked the idea of using scripting for some specific needs.
Then, just some days with Gig Performer demo, and it was an insta-purchase.
Recreating The Edge´s setup entirely with plugins is hard as the guy uses a huge amount of hardware and each song has specific effects and settings. Additionally, I wanted to keep it simple.
The sound of the first records is quite similar, so he basically altered the delay times on each song when played live, and other than that sound is pretty similar. This can be seen on live records like Under a Red Blood Sky one.
So I basically created an ¨early 80´s¨ rackspace with Valhalla Delay, some OD and just adjust variations per song for that era.
Same with Joshua Tree Songs, just a rackspace with a more clean delay, and variations per song.
For the 90´s and 2000´s songs, I just decided to create a rackspace per song, as practically each song has some specific effects that are not shared with other songs, Whammys on even Better, Rotary speaker on One, more heavy distortions…
And regarding the amp simulations, I tried to keep it same way The Edge does. Everything goes in front on some AC30 and Fender Amps. So for keeping consistency with the sound, I used a global rackspace with a couple of AC30 emulations (Nembrini) and a Fender (S-Gear).
All rackspaces end up hitting this amps in the global rackspace.
Another interesting thing is the Drop / Detune effect. There are a lot of songs that used guitar dropped to Eb or lower. As I wanted to keep thing simpler and not take more guitars to a show, I used Digitech Drop pedal for that, because Fractal detune doesn´t sound good enough. For the computer based rig, I just use Helix Native Poly Capo, that sounds same to me without so much latency. And setting is saved on each variation, so I don´t forget to activate / deactivate on each song, as it happened before.
Regarding the hardware, I´ll share some pictures of the rack as we play some shows this summer, but it is basically a half unit rack with a 2020 mac mini m1, a Motu Ultralite V, my IEM emmiter, and a small usb powered router. No need for a super powerful machine for this, I run all these rackspaces with 3 amp emulations, shimmer reverbs and everything and it´s around 28% CPU.
Gig Performer is also playing the click and backing track using an audio player in the global rackspace with a small script that just chooses the song based on the song in the setlist.
And a VSTI for a piano for New Year´s Day song, so I just got rid of my keyboard and used a simple and cheap Midi controller.
This Midi controller has some fader controllers that I am using to make my IEM mix.
So there is a Gig Performer mixer with guitar, keyboard, click, backing track and external audio, and the output is connected to my IEM device. External audio is basically one input of my interface with the mix I get from the sound tech, that is normally voice, some drums, and bass. All the other stuff is being mixed in Gig Performer, and controlled with the midi controller so I could make small adjustments live if needed. This is basically gold. I could use a tablet with some OSC as well, but the keyboard fader controllers are handy.
The router. This is for being able to connect an ipad to the mac mini as monitor / mouse without any cable, using Luna Display device. At some point I could just probably just use a macbook instead, but it´s working fine so far with this setup
And last, for video playing, we are using a self-developed app called VI-Stage on another computer, just a M1 macbook. This laptop connects to the network using the small router and gets OSC messages to play videos and show idle image when the video song ends. So it´s like a software B.Beat but without any cable or pedal or whatever, and it just synchronizes with Gig Performer seamlessly.
So yeah, this is my experience with Gig Performer and the computer based rig. I hope it gives some ideas to someone, just feel free to ask anything if you want.
I´ll try to update some pictures and content as it progresses over time.
Cheers!
