Neil Golden - Moving from Nord + effects pedals, to Gig Performer on a Mac

[npudar]

This is from the Music Player Network forum (handle: “Octa”).

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Not much sleep here, due to reading manuals and watching YouTube, but am really enjoying Gig Performer 5.1.1 so far. I see quite a few folks here have been using Gig Performer since 2017 or so. I’m a newbie but it seems really stable, powerful and intuitive.

My main goal is to supplement either or sometimes both the Yamaha YC88 and the Viscount Legend One with AP/EP/Synth sounds. Occasionally or maybe often (we’ll see), I’ll be using their built-in USB Audio interfaces, but I recently found a good deal on a used RME Babyface Pro FS and will use that as often as possible. I like running at 96khz and the nice clean gain which is available from the RME preamps. Having driver stability and TotalMix FX is also a plus.

Sleepless ramble over. Now back to tweaking Rackspaces while watching Gig Performer channel on YouTube. (which is quite good)

Maybe someone here will be interested in where this ended up after tons of research/shopping/blood, sweat & tears.

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Mac Mini is M4 Pro with 48 GB RAM and 1 TB internal.
You all were right, the MacBook Air M1 performs just about as well as M4 and will be used for multi-track recording and grab ‘n’ go gigs.

That’s my old iPhone 7 Plus, rescued from a junk drawer, connected to Mac Mini with Yam Display with Gig Performer.

At some gigs I’ll use an iPad as display instead. Touch screen works great with Yam Display in wired mode. I also ordered an HDMI to USB-c capture card and a foldable keyboard/trackpad if the going gets rough.

I still have a lot of widget-ing to do in Gig Performer but it will be fun controlling these pedals, and some may go away as I discover plugins that do whatever “job” I’m trying to do with these pedals.

The Overloud TH-U (included with Gig Performer) knocked the Iridium off the board a couple of days ago.

There are some USB patch cables and a hub coming, to make this all look a little tidier, thanks to Bezoos’ Prime Week. I need to remember to cancel that before the 30 free days runs out.

[npudar]

After the previous pics, I had to add a my old Radial stereo line driver to the end of pedal chain. (The iPhone 7 will be velcroed to the top of that)

All 4 of the pedals could be set to receive line level input, and on Strymon I enabled buffer because their ceiling is low, but to get it back to line level, I almost ordered the pricy Radial EXTC stereo box but this J+4 is sounding good:

The XLR’s coming into RME (labelled N and J by an old recording engineer friend) are from the YC88 XLR outs.

So basically, the goal with this setup was to have 2 stereo pair(s), one with pedals and one straight to mixer.

I kept the Radial Key Largo because it’s the best mixer/DI combo I’ve heard, that fits on a pedalboard. If its effects send/return didn’t only access 40-50% of pedal, I would’ve used it instead of RME, but lost TotalMix FX.

In the reflection on phone, you can see the screen I use with Gig Performer at home, and the rack that goes to MacBook Air for recording.

And already this morning, Cherry Audio’s $19 Stardust 201 Tape Echo VST is sounding killer. I can see how digital pedals may be unnecessary on my board soon.

[npudar]

So I ended up getting a gig with some folks who cover Cumbia, a style of music from Colombia which sounds like it’s from the 70’s mostly.

Here are a few of the original tunes we covered:

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This turned out to be a great Gig Performer learning experience as there are all sorts of instruments/synths/rhythmic sound FX to cover in this music.

After spending maybe 100 hours getting rackspaces/songs ready I was able to link ForScore on iPad with Gig Performer and change patches with my homemade cheat sheets. It turned out to be a really fun gig!

I’m still buying a good many plugins and was concentrating on zero-latency plugins (there’s Zero-latency plugins - list on Gig Performer forum).

Like Valhalla Delay/Vintageverb and Waves CLA-76, but couldn’t resist Soundtoys and wow they sound great. Tremolator sounds as good as my Strymon Flint did on Wurly and Phase Mistress can replace my Zelzah. Echo Boy jr. and Decapitator are also killer. I’ve seen mixing engineers love the latter on drums.

[npudar]

The fun and useful adventures with Gig Performer continue!

Lately I’ve been in an orchestra pit covering trumpet/cello/horn/harp/celeste/sound FX for Sondheim’s musical “Into the Woods”. It’s incredible, brilliant musically and otherwise. Only had a week and a half to prepare so I spent every waking minute and more getting ready (mostly editing & compiling a PDF in ForScore) and improving my counting, as the gmeter and tempo changes often!

Weekend 1 went well and weekend 2 is upcoming. I’ll likely be learning parts and plugging holes up until the last show. Anyway, Gig Performer sure makes things easier!

Other equipment used: SL mk2 73, Arturia Keylab mk2, MacBook Air M1 w/ Ugreen hub, RME Babyface FS, Motion Sound KP610s. Due to limited time and budget I’m using Korg Triton VST (which does pretty well!) for instruments except Omnisphere/Keyscape for celeste.

[Trodsky]

Inspiring and awesome! Great tip on the Radial Line Driver. Also a KeyLargo fan and user here!