Introducing myself: Starting my journey with Gig Performer

Hi,

finally, I’m a happy new registered user of Gig Performer now, after being on stage with Brainspawn Forte for the last 17 years.

Although Forte still runs extremely well on my 7 years old Dell Precision M4800 laptop under Win7, it’s time for a switch to my new Clevo PB51DDS laptop under Win10.

Currently I’m taking my time during the lockdown to crossmorph all my sounds from the old Forte laptop to the new one with Gig Performer. I’m playing keyboards in a semi-pro rock and metal cover band, with a slight bias to Rammstein, usually playing ~45 songs per show, 10-20 shows per year. For each song I need completely different and rather complex mappings of sounds and samples to my keyboards. With Forte I used Bomes MIDI Translator Pro as additional software (and complexity) to realize smooth switching of MIDI channels and sounds during one song. With Gig Perfomer, I’m using variations and widges, now.

I started with the three four most complex songs, and I have to say, after a little learning curve, I can realize everything with Gig Perfomer after only a couple of days, what I was able to do with Forte after years of experience, only. And even more like smooth transitions between songs with persistence on.

My main instruments are Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2, NI Kontakt 6 and Steinberg HalionSonic3, together with 4Front TruePianos. In almost every song, I have a combination of some of them.

My key rig consists of a Korg Wavestation (*1992), now used as a master keyboard only, and a Roland Edirol PCR-300 controller keyboard on top. I have two of each, one rig for the home studio, and one rig for band rehearsal and tour. Sound interface is a RME Babyface Pro running at 96 samples @ 44,1kHz. More on latency and jitter later :slight_smile: For monitoring I love my Sennheiser HD650 phones, with some EQing in the Babyface.
My new laptop is a Clevo PB51DDS i7-10875 32GB RAM 2x 1TB SSD gaming machine, needing some tweaks and testing for good audio performance at very low fan noise.

Perhaps I will have many questions and also some ideas on Gig Performer, so I’m looking forward for many exciting discussions on this excellent forum.

Cheers,
Angel

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Welcome to the show. Glad to have you.

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Hi @Angel and welcome to the GP world!

Nice rig! seems in the right direction with GP :wink:

Let me leave this Comprehensive guide to optimize Windows PCs (from @npudar )
everyone Win user praises and maybe you learn some more :wink:
https://gigperformer.com/how-to-optimize-your-pc-for-the-stage-download-free-ebook/

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Hi @Angel, nice to see you adopting GP for your keyboards rig. :wink::+1::beer:

HI @Angel welcome to the Family :wink:

Welcome! :slight_smile:

Here’s a great guest blog article for Forte users:
https://gigperformer.com/what-brainspawn-forte-users-should-know-about-gig-performer/

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Usually the better performance of a processor results in more ventilation, but given your PC’s processor, even if you lower the fan speed, the performance will still be more than adequate. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you very much!
Actually, I’m familiiar with these DAW tweaks since I have preppared three and now my 4th laptop for live audio performance within the last almost 20 years.
Most important tweaks, for my current laptop, which I found out by testing to avoid clicks and pops with GP3, 2x Omnisphere + Kontakt 6 +HalioSonic3, each heavily loaded with sounds and samples and disk streaming, and switching rackspaces or songs with audio persistence is on, predictive loading is off:

  • BIOS power mode: High performance, this is an XMG/Schenker BIOS option for Clevo laptops.
  • System, Optimize for backgrounds apps.
  • Disable hyperthreading.
  • “Ultimate performance” energy profile, min. CPU clock 100% always.
  • Intel Speed Step on (!), to enable Turbo Boost.
    The last one is different from recommendations in the e-book. But I can definitely reproduce it by A-B comparison. No clicks during rackspace or song change with SpeedStep/Turbo boost on, some clicks when off. Turbo Boost seems to give some extra power during activation of the next song as long as the old one is still playing audio. On the other side, CPU sleep is prevented by BIOS power settings and Win10 energy settings, still.

Maybe different from machine to machine.
Bye,
Angel

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You’re right, using only one CPU core by Omnisphere in GP, (Kontakt and HalionSonic plug-ins set to use 4 cores, each), GP can’t really generate much heat on the CPU :slight_smile:

It’s more the parasitic scheduled apps like updaters, virus scanners etc. that cause short periods of very high CPU load and fan noise. Still have not found all options to switch them off in Win10.

The original EC BIOS of the Clevo laptop has a very aggressive fan cooling strategy for this kind of gaming machines, somewhat tamed by the XMG/Schenker BIOS version. With a dedicated fan control software the laptop now is almost totally quiet, CPU <65°C, even with heavily playing notes … nice!

This is an interesting one. :slight_smile: According to my tests with Gig Performer this setting didn’t make any difference:

Background

Did you perhaps perform any tests on these two settings?

Good question. I would need to ckeck, it’s not obvious. It seemed to help not directly on avoiding clicks at high CPU load in Gig Performance at very low audio driver latency, but avoided some clicks when other things are going on like page scrolling in PDF manuals while playing.
Maybe an urban myth … but one of the oldest for Window DAWs.
At least without side effects so I keep it.

Yeah, that makes sense — that “adjust for best performance” is just around scheduling to make GUIs seem more responsive. But all the important action in our system happens in a real-time audio thread so those choices wouldn’t be relevant.

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