Gig Performer on a French tour

Just a quick message to let you know that I am currently on tour with a French singer named Aldebert. We are in the middle of an 18-month tour, during which we will perform more than 150 shows in front of a total audience of over 250,000 spectators.

The unique aspect of this tour is that we are performing children’s music, and the theme of our new album is metal. To comply with the legal limit of 94 dB imposed for young audiences, we have a completely silent stage setup, featuring electronic drums, keyboards, and amp simulations via Quad Cortex.

We chose to use Gig Performer for both the drum setup (Toontrack Superior Drummer and Kontakt) and the keyboard setup (various plugins to perfectly replicate the album sounds, including Arturia, Native Instruments, Spectrasonics, ReFX, etc.). A third machine runs Ableton Live to play a few backing tracks (virtual duets, guitar reinforcements) and sends program changes to both Gig Performer instances, as well as timecode to the media server.

I’m writing to thank you for your work on Gig Performer. We are halfway through the tour, and we haven’t experienced a single crash so far (except for Arturia plugins, whose licenses have the annoying habit of jumping ship randomly, but that has nothing to do with Gig Performer). Initially, I was reluctant to use a fully software-based solution again, as I had many issues with MainStage 10 years ago. However, after testing various options, I ultimately chose GP for this tour because I couldn’t make it crash during the two weeks of pre-tour rehearsals.

Congratulations on this amazing software that makes our lives easier every day!

Cheers,
Christophe

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Have a wonderful time on the rest of your tour. I would love to hear some of your tracks!

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Thank you for sharing this. If you have some photos or videos, please feel free to share them here :slight_smile:

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Hello guys,
Thank you for your message. As requested, you can hear my work on this project (as a keyboard player, but also as co-producer and mixer of the record) here :

or

I’ll send photos this week-end as we have 5 gigs in 3 days :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Max Cavalera :love_you_gesture:

I listened to this playlist, good stuff.

Hi @Touf , we’re happy to have a few more French GP users in our community forum. Your rig seems to already fit your use case, but don’t hesitate if you need to discuss the fine tuning of some particular points of your setup.

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Hi @David-san

I’ve done quite a lot of experimenting, but I’m still looking for ways to improve our setup. For instance, I’d like to eliminate the long MIDI cables between the GP stations and the Ableton station, especially since all these computers are already connected to the same wired network.

I experimented with sending program changes via OSC, which works fine, but I still need MIDI to transport MTC, as I have a bunch of arpeggiators in my presets. It’s much easier to play when synced via MTC to ensure the pattern starts at the beginning of a bar.

Is there any way to send MTC over RJ45, other than the terrible RTP-MIDI, which I find highly unreliable?

I am using this:

This is chapter

This I am using for my keytar

Like @pianopaul I also use the midiBeam device for my keytar. And many GP users reported to use this solution which seems to be reliable in all stage situations.

Regarding MTC, if your computers are on the same network, is there any reason why you don’t use Ableton Link to sync Ableton Live and GP ? It should work out of the box. Or did I miss something ? :thinking: