Demoing, questions, manual not helpful!

General discussion about Gig Performer
1

So I have a couple of requests - I’d be very grateful for feedback before I spend 14 days trying something that cannot be easily, or elegantly achieved

I’m trying out the demo, hoping I could replace MainStage.

BUT. The manual is awful. It looks so ugly to start with, like something from the 90s. OK some of you think that’s a minor issue, but not for those of us challenged by visually ugly screens…

I want to create a mixer, only 10 channels - OK so I have easily created a couple of channels for guitar and vocals, but - in creating the widgets on the “panel” - am I right in thinking that -
a/ Widgets cannot be snapped, all alignments have to be done manually? I want 10 channels, and I want them on a background, with a fader, preferably a meter, etc. Lining them all up manually really is a pain.

b/ No way to add multiple widgets, faders etc all at once so they auto-align?

c/ The built in “mixer” in plugins defaults to stereo input, a pair of channels, even if I set it to mono, it remains a stereo input channel. Can’t change that from? And it doesn’t show up in the panels. So it cannot be used as a controller driven mixer? I want to use something like a small Korg NanoKontrol for channel faders.

d/ Blimey! How on earth do you find the container that is Guitar FX? I tried looking at the templates but there’s no way I could re-create that from scratch - I’m afraid that remains a mystery.

Overall I want 8 mono and 2 stereo inputs from my interface, a backing track sometimes, effects, of course.

Thanks for reading and if you respond thanks again. I’m sure some of you will tell me to read the manual. But so far every time I’ve looked at that, well, it doesn’t work for me. Terse is the word that springs to mind.

2

First of all, welcome to the forum

What do you mean by container?

3

You can multi select widgets and align them in multiple ways

4

I find the manual very informative, all aspects are documented.
Did you use the online version or the PDF?

It is all a matter of taste

The cat loves a mouse, I do not,

5

You can map widgets to different parts of the mixer.
The widgets can be MIDI learned from your external controller.
If you do not like the stereo concept of the mixer then use mono gain plugins and map them to widgets

6

All of that can be done very easily.

7

My concern is that you might already be going down the wrong path, philosophically. It sounds to me that you are trying to “emulate” the MainStage approach in Gig Performer but the GP paradigm is quite different and so it will probably be frustrating to do things that way.

No :slight_smile:
For example, as explained in the documentation (!), To add multiple copies of a widget at once, drag a widget onto the surface, but don’t release the mouse button (1); while holding the mouse button, type the number of copies (up to 9) you want onto the panel

8

OK Thanks for all this info, I will try and find an hour or so tomorrow to continue.

I’m not trying to emulate the MainStage paradigm - but of course the very concept of a live mixer on a computer screen has certain aspects that I would prefer to not un-learn and learn again. I get the way that GP sets itself up visually when looking at the templates, but I see very little behind the scenes to emulate one of its own templates and build upon it. The “container” I was talking about is the box named Guitar FX in the wiring of the guitar template.

And as for example, “as explained in the documentation (!), To add multiple copies of a widget at once, drag a widget onto the surface, but don’t release the mouse button (1); while holding the mouse button, type the number of copies (up to 9) you want onto the panel”

All well and good if one has the time to read the online manual in detail. More intuitive would be a right click mouse over said widget in the pick list and an “add x” dialogue - don’t think I’ve ever come across anything quite like what you’ve described, but hey, cats like mice - and neither do I!

9

GP is an extremely complex application and so it’s worth perusing the documentation to get up to speed. That said, if you’re looking for instant gratification (as opposed to a system designed to not fail when one is actually performing, the main reason we gave up on MS and developed GP in the first place), then GP might be a bit of a struggle for you.

But simply dragging and pressing a key is much faster than right-clicking and selecting — and workflow is an important factor for GP users.

Well, you can load one of the templates and use it as a starting point but there isn’t currently a way to create one’s one setup and then make a template from it.

10

Hello, Scardo,

Welcome to the Gig Performer forum. A great helpful group of people are here.

Personally, I am not so great at learning by reading manuals. So, I watched a lot of youtube videos walking through various aspects of Gig Performer. That is especially useful if you can pause the video and try to do what they are doing. (Be aware of the date of the video as GP has continued to evolve/improve over time).

Typically you would add a mixer to your “Local Rackspace” (often just referred to as a “rackspace”). There are various options regarding number of channels (and you get use more than one, if necessary). The mixer would be inserted into a “Rackspace”. Then you can add widgets and map them to the mixer.

Personally, I love this widget to connect to the mixer in the rackspace. I pretty much use it on every new rackspace:

Good luck. I feel pretty comfortable, you cannot go wrong with Gig Performer. It is very intuitive, but it is about as “deep” as you care to make it (much deeper than I my use case).

Jeff

11

I’m not afraid of complex applications (I have a PhD in Electro-acoustic composition, and used to program hexadecimal for midi in the 90s…) and I certainly don’t want instant gratification - but I stand by my comments about the online manual, which is truly horrible! Hyper links and dense text. I use a variety of complex software packages daily, but perhaps, whilst you feel GP is intuitive, one needs a simple route into its methodology, and the manual, (OK that’s just my peculiarity of brain interpretation) is not the way in.

I’ll take a look at some videos.

12

If you are more of a visual learner, then I would definitely look more down the video tutorial route for GP… and there are quite a few excellent videos out there.

The one piece of advice I would give to you about using GP (and I would give the very same advice to the “me” of a few years ago when I embarked on learning GP) is:

“Be prepared to unlearn some of the ways you usually achieve certain goals in live host/DAW software. GP is complex and works in some rather different ways. But the more you go down the route of using it as intended, the more you come to realise the wisdom of the approach which has been learnt the hard way by many professional users (including the dev team) over many, many years of performing live using computers.”

13

Welcome @Scardo. Your photo shows a guitar, so I’ll assume you’re a guitar player. In that case, maybe another way in is:

  1. Ditch the manual for now :toilet:
  2. Open the (default) rackspace in the wiring view
  3. Add a few plugins
  4. If having added more than 1 plugins: Draw wires the way you want them between the plugins
  5. Draw wires from the input section to the plugin(s)
  6. Draw wires to the output section from the plugin(s)

Play guitar. You should hear something by now. Nothing magical (apart from your playing).

At this point it works but doesn’t make much sense. Now some GP stuff:

  1. Go to the edit view
  2. Add some widgets (knobs, buttons, sliders) from the left
  3. Attach the widgets to parameters your’re interested in to adjust of the plugins you added
  4. Go to the panels view and play guitar
  5. Adjusting the knobs/button/sliders should change the sound (depending on the parameter of the plugins of course)

If that works: so far so good.
Now some GP stuff that will make this super-simple project a more real GP project:

  1. In panels view mode add a variation (that’s not a rackspace. It’s a variation of the rackspace you started with)
  2. Activate the new variation by clicking on it
  3. Change one knob/button/slider to a value that makes a real difference to the sound (it’s just a try-out to see how things work)
  4. When you change between the variations, you’ll see that the changes to the knobs/buttons/sliders will be kept by these widget for each variation.

At this point you’ve essentially the core of GP working. From this (starting)point you can go to add MIDI controllers to control the widgets and also control the rackspaces/variations. Another interesting feature would be the songs and setlists (same route: first add a song the project, attach/lock it to a rackspace or a variation of it. If that works attach a MIDI controller).

Note: When starting with MIDI controllers for a real project: Look into rig-manager. That will save a lot of headaches when you want to change controllers between, say, rehearsals and performances. (I’m afraid to say but I guess you’ll have to retrieve the manual from the trash-bin for that. :flushed:)

That’s how I started. I didn’t bother too much about reading the manual. Just some experimenting. Coming from a traditional DAW, GP was much easier when it comes to connecting plugins, making ‘presets’ by using rackspaces and their variations, etc.

I know this approach sounds simple, but maybe it works also for you.

I hope you’ll have fun :slight_smile:.

14

Thanks @Frank1119
I’m having no trouble creating a chain, hearing my guitar etc. And attaching widgets to control parameters, no problem. It’s the visual complex setup with a multi-channel input and routing that is giving me a bit of a headache. I can add the channels all fine, and the effects etc, but it’s the screen layout on the panels side that is just a bit clumsy. We’ll see!
But thanks for your comments and tips.

16

Have a look through the preview images on these user-created panels. If you open the included gig/rackspace file, you can export a panel and reuse it. There are also some workflow shortcuts to quickly map the widgets to your plugins.

17

The layout is what you place on the panel.

And to be honest, I do not care how the panel looks - I am a live musician.
Important is functionality like automation of variation changes, volume ramps, show score in time with the song etc.
And not to forget the super easy scripting, did you ever try such things in MainStage?

MainStage does not support predictive load, Rig Manager, easy scripting, Song mode etc.

But if you feel uncomfortable with the concept of Gig Performer, then you should stay on MainStage.

18

Thanks for all the tips and suggestions here. I am a visual learner and various videos have helped me enormously.

I’ve managed to create a good working panel with my 8 outputs on faders, and various settings for different songs. The setlist function is amazing.

Now tackling the media player and wondering whether I need to use a separate player in a new rack in order to play different songs. At the moment I cannot see how to have the next song cued up within one rack with variations - ideally I’d like each variation that needs a media file to have that selected ready to trigger from a pedal, but it looks like that’s not possible within variations.

I’m sure I’ll have more questions and will post these as separate Qs in good time.

Meantime just a big thank to the helpful people here. I’m one of those people who gets very flustered and irritated when I can’t get something working in what appears to me to be a logical way. Eventually I get to understand the method and start having fun - which I am now doing with Gigperformer - a major live show with multi-media aspects is now looking very feasible using GP. I was in fact thinking it wouldn’t be possible to do the stripped down version solo, but with GP I now believe that is possible - Kudos!