I’m a keyboard player who does mostly pit orchestra gigs. I’m looking at migrating from Mainstage to Gig Performer. So far, it has been a good experience, and setting up patches has been pretty straight forward. However I have one thing I’m struggling with.
As I understand it, the best option in Gig Performer would be to set up a rackspace for each instrument/patch/sound that I need. For example, I’d have a piano rackspace, a strings rackspace, “soft pad” rackspace and on and on to cover the “sounds” called for in the score. I can also have some variations where there might be some small differences or tweaks to the widgets for different parts of songs, etc.
Then, I’d assemble all those rackspaces/variations into songs. So, song 1 needs piano, then strings, then piano and back to strings, so I set it up that way, and go through the song.
In Mainstage, I could send all of my patches to an “Aux Bus”, then apply any final FX or adjustments on that bus, which was then sent out. Sometimes I get to the venue, or we get into tech rehearsal and I need to make an adjustment - maybe there is too much reverb overall, or I need to just bring the volume down or the sound guy is asking for some overall change - whatever it might be. In Mainstage, I could apply those FX/adjustments uniformly across everything by adjusting that “Aux Bus”.
I’m not sure how to best do that in Gig Performer. I can put the plugins/fx on each rackspace, but then if I need to make a change “overall” I have to go to each rackspace (and perhaps variation?) and make those adjustments. When a show can easily have 100+ “patch changes” that can get… tedious.
Any tips? Some part of me thinks the “multi-instance” might be the right direction, but I’m not totally clear.
Hi @tannerlindsay, welcome to the GP community. Yes, using an extra GP instance for the effects could be a good idea. The idea is to loopback the audio output of your instruments plugin instance of GP and to use it as an audio input of your GP instance dedicated to the effects plugin (loopback can be achieved using the hardware of you audio interface or a piece of software like Blackhole (Mac) or Loopbe1 (Win)). This will probably necessitates to use an audio interface with a multi-client driver. What is you OS and audio interface?
One other suggestion… and this all depends on how many sounds you are building and if you need patch persist between them or not…
I built a rackspace that essentially had a lot of sounds built into one rackspace and I would just toggle them on/off with (primarily) plugin bypass buttons, the button states could then be saved as variations.
All these sounds fed into a multi-ch mixer and aux sends to effects which I also had widgets to control gain, mute and solo.
So as long as I didn’t need to change rackspaces, I had consistent control over mix features between sounds and FX snd/returns but could switch on/off different sounds (and even if there were layered/split) between variations.
The downsides were…
that if I wanted to use three different plugin presets for say a piano VST, I had to have three instances of that plugin in my rackspace as variations do not support different presets at the plugin level, nor do they support any wiring changes.
Changing splits or layers (via midi) between variations ment that if I was still playing as I switched, I’d get hanging notes.
No patch persist this way… all sound had to stop when I changed variations.
It made for a fairly big rackspace and once I reached the limitation of just one rackspace with a lot of variations, when I duplicated this ‘master’ rackspace it increased loading time of the Gig file significantly.
I ultimately kept the framework for this because I like the layout and the ability to just un-bypass plugins to turn on more sounds… but I greatly reduced the size of it and changed nearly everything back to rackspaces for sound-per-song changes vs. trying to do this all with variations.
I use a very light-weight plugin as a placeholder in my template rackspace for where my more memory intensive VSTs would live, so I can keep my scripting framework but keep my load times down.
This new approach I netted out on doesn’t give you the same AUX flexibility you are looking for but @David-san suggestion is a good one for this if your system supports it.
Thanks. I was kinda wondering about that. Wasn’t sure if there was a built in way do the loopback.
I’m using Windows 10 with a KompleteAudio6 interface. I’m not sure if I’m following what you mean by “multi-client driver”. But I do have enough in/out on the interface. I’d imagine I would just send all the rackspaces to 3/4, then pull from 3/4, through the second instance and out 1/2. Granted, that might mean a literal, physical loopback on my interface…
I’ve also used VoiceMeeter in the past, and it should be able to do the loopback.
It would be interesting if there was a “built-in” plugin that was basically a “send to rackspace” sort of thing, so my output goes to this “psuedo output” that is picked up by the rack space in my other instance.
(And now I’m reading the post about asking for help, so I’ll include more details)
A multi-client ASIO driver is an audio interface driver which make it possible to use an audio interface in several audio application at the same time. I just checked and your NI audio interface is multi-client.
This makes sense, and the devs are always looking for good idea for the future, but for now, you will have to use voicemeeter
As I am not a native English speaker, may I ask what pit ochestra gigs means? Are you playing for musicals or something?
Yep. Pit orchestra is the “lingo” for the musicians playing for a musical theatre show. I’d guess the “orchestra” part is pretty clear. I think the “pit” part came from the fact that (at least traditionally in American theatres) the orchestra is underneath the stage - aka in the “pit”
