I’m a looong time MainStage user (ie like about 12 or 13 years) at a fork in the road for my live rig. Tired of being resource-capped in MainStage on my 2015 i5 MBP 16GB RAM and hearing from GP users saying “it’s not an issue for me”.
I’ve watched quite a few videos but I’m finding that their either too rudimentary (I’ve been connecting MIDI/audio devices since the 1980’s…) or they dig right into some specific (but cool) feature in GP. To maximize my potential transition to GP I want to more or less keep a similar workflow as what I’m doing in Mainstage, transition my library of songs over to GP, then start leveraging the extra goodness that it provides. I can’t just burn down my other environment as I play in several gigging projects. This would likely just be meaningful to those who played around in MainStage before transitioning like me. Sorry to all the others of my rambling.
So, here goes… in a MainStage Concert I define set folders with patches (as you’d expect) but each patch is actually several instruments/settings to make up a song. So if I have 3 sets of 12 songs, I’ll have 3 folders with a total of 36 songs. I use bandhelper on the side to send program changes to Mainstage to increment patches/songs as needed. Bandhelper also sends program change messages to an iPad running BLE MIDI and ForScore to increment my charts. So my master setlist is in Bandhelper and MainStage/Forscore are “slaves” to program changes. I don’t use aliases in mainstage because I painstakingly alter every patch vrs defining an organ, piano, strings sound and recycle. Doesn’t work for my use cases.
I have tons of 3rd party plugins, I do use a few Logic/MainStage ones that I know won’t make the journey over but that’s ok. I can find/make a suitable sound with my Arturia/Korg/Roland/NI/UVI/etc library pretty easily.
So…staring at the blank canvas that is GP, what advice can the collective give me to initially rebuild my MainStage platform in GP and get started without fundamentally changing my workflow?
Thanks…excited to get going quickly and prove this out.
First of all, Gig Performer is different from Mainstage
So you have to change your workflow.
What you call a set in Mainstage is a setlist in Gig Performer.
In gig Performer you have rackspaces which are patches in Mainstage.
In gig Performer you have variations, this does not exist in Mainstage.
In gig Performer you have songs with song parts where you can reuse rackspace variations.
Again a feature which does not exist in Mainstage.
In gig Performer there is an option called predictive load, this is not available in Mainstage.
With this option you can preserve RAM, in Mainstage all is loaded into RAM.
In Mainstage you have typical channel strips, in Gig Performer you have free routing.
You see you have to think different when building rackspaces.
I’m a GP newbie and a Long time MS user too and just like white2833, I’m Old Skool. MIDI Keyboard Controller from the 80’s to a rack of synths is where I started. My biggest concern about migrating to GP is the Keyboard Layering the MS shows me. I often bust out 5 zones and layers and can never remeber exactly where they are. I really like seeing the visual cue where I might have a sample or two. How do you do this with GP?
The current version of GP does not have that visual view. Some users have developed some GP Script tools that provide this kind of view and hopefully someone will point you at an example.
