The first pushback I have heard from even gigging musicians against even trying Gig Performer offstage is “it’s too complicated.” It’s not as easy to use as plugging in a pedal. It’s also not utterly constrained by that pedal, but I digress. Especially if seconds to tone the first time you use it is your only criteria.
But if you have a half a dozen or more VSTs configured for a specific result and you can smoothly fade to that result from one of the others you have prepared even in the middle of a song, then the criteria ought to be expanded. Never mind all the other features and the mind bending ones coming in v5. You can get to those.
The second pushback is “it’s too hard to understand.” It isn’t. What ‘it is,’ is impossible to understand if you haven’t tried yet, therefore refuse.
The third is “it’s too expensive.” Compared to what? An infinitude of custom digital instruments you craft yourself, in minutes or even seconds, any of which you can summon with a single MIDI controller gesture, or a pedal press? I think anyone who thinks Gig Performer is “too expensive” does not understand what it delivers.
And that leads to the final and determining objection; learning curve, They DO NOT want to invest the time and effort to learn. Anything, At all. Not even a little. Because it’s too hard and too expensive.
That’s the opposite of the correct thought process because it enforces the limitations you have without Gig Performer,
Bizarrely these are very often people who make a pretty big deal about having a philosophy of freedom in general.
The correct thought process is asking the question “what do I want to end up able to do” and then answering it by dragging and dropping and clicking a few menu items here and there once in a while. Then you save it and use it as desired. That’s the correct thought process because it allows you to achieve your use case.
But, NOOOOOOO!!!
It does cost as much as a fancy new pedal. It also gives you, for example, meta-presets with a noise floor that picks its teeth mockingly with the fancy new boutique pedal. Even from a modest audio interface. Take your pick.
It crushes the features of all pedals with the heartlessness reserved for the initial explosion of a supernova. Oh and it runs all arbitrary VSTs too. Sequencers. MIDI files and backing tracks. Whatever you need. Read the spec sheet. Not in the spec sheet fine use the GPScript. Still no go? SDK for C# have at it. But you still don’t want to try it? Want to use free software or something? Best of luck with that. I hope nothing crashes.
I’ve literally run thousands and thousands of hours of synths, samplers, effects… you name it. Some VSTs crash that’s true, and some of them can take Gig Performer with them. That isn’t Gig Perfomer’s fault.
There’s a thing called value. If you want to max out the value in this endeavour of human ingenuity, I think Gig Performer is the way you do it. And that opinion is formed by my couple of years now of really doing crazy, arguably stupid things with it. It doesn’t care.
