Songs, backing tracks, and global q's

Hey all. I’m just getting into gig performer and trying to make the most of my trial to find if it is right for me. Little background, I am a guitarist in a cover band. I will be using this to control one guitar plugin by Neural DSP, and playing backing tracks for songs. I’ve tried a few different setups and just wanted to see if there are any better that I haven’t tried.

Now I have a rackspace with one instance of my plugin for each song. Rack variations and song parts change various things in that plugin (clean/dirty/solo/etc). Each rackspace also has an audio file player. This works fine, but it does take forever to load (not really a problem, just commenting).

I also tried having one rackspace for my guitar, as I don’t really need one for each song. Then I had multiple audio players so I could load all my songs. That didn’t seem to be the best option, managing 3-4 audio players with 8 tracks each was a bit cumbersome.

I also thought about having a rackspace for each song with just an audio player, then having the guitar on the global. That would also mean I only need the one instance of my guitar plugin. That wasn’t quite as user-friendly as having one plugin per rackspace (I hope that makes sense?), but of course it loads much faster.

Again, I know this is all stuff I will probably figure out on my own as I use it, but I want to make the most of my time while I can. This program seems wonderful but I can’t get over the nervousness of relying on a computer while playing live…

Thanks for any tips!

Hi @toddkc

welcome to the family.

Believe me, you can trust a computer - when it is the right one :wink:

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Welcome @toddkc
Using separate rackspaces is a good option. It also leaves you open to incorporate other plugins with Neural on certain songs, or even another amp sim for certain songs.

If you don’t need to transition instantly between rackspaces, you can also switch on Predictive Loading in the GP Options, where you can set how many rackspaces are preloaded into memory. This will speed up loading of the Gig file.

However you will need to follow the order of the rackspaces or use the Setlist/Song feature in order for GP to know which song is next (to preload it).

Separate racks sounds good. Even though I’m only planning on using the one plugin it does seem smart to leave myself open to using any plugin for any song, and make that my default workflow. I did try turning on Predictive Loading, and while the gig file opens instantly I still don’t here any sound and can’t do anything for like 10 seconds, even when switching to the songs/racks that are supposedly preloaded. Windows even adds the (not responding) to the application header bar sometimes. So far predictive loading seems much worse than just opening the gig file and doing something else while it loads. Obviously I need to play with it more. Thanks!

An optimized Windows PC for audio + a decent audio interface can make a very reliable setup.

We have a guide as well: FREE e-book by Deskew - Optimize your Windows PC for the stage!

Also, check out the Gig Performer in Action category to see many guitarists and photos/videos of their setup :slight_smile:

For example: these professional musicians are very happy using a computer with Gig Performer, let’s name a few:

And the best thing is that this community is very friendly and helpful. :slight_smile:

Welcome :beers:

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This isn’t the intended behaviour, so it would be good to figure out what’s going on. But if you have the memory to load everything, then having predictive loading switched off is the better option.

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I am going to keep messing with it, but yeah for now at least loading it all is working fine. I will keep trying to find ways to optimize my racks anyways.

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Is that true always or just when you are starting up for the first time? You will certainly have to wait for at least a few rackspaces to be loaded before you can start using GP if you have predictive loading enabled. But as @rank13 noted, you shouldn’t need it if you have enough RAM

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Tod, Archetype Cory Wong (v2) is causing very long loading times. If that is the one NDSP plugin you use, try to downgrade to v1.

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It may be trying to connect to “mother” (remote server) and having issues — one never knows. Sadly, one is at the mercy of plugins that do stupid things like that — if you can reproduce, you should contact the developer of the plugin.

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Yeah that is totally it. I tried making a new gig with 5 instances of helix native, non predictive loading, and it was MUCH faster than the gig with Neural DSP Archetype Petrucci. Again, after the neural plugin loads that first time there is no issue, so it’s not a huge deal, but definitely good to know. I’m also sitting at 17% cpu usage with helix vs 28% using neural. It’s not 100% on either so it doesn’t really matter, just an observation.

Sorry for the double post, but I feel like I gotta add this to my discussion for some positivity! I had no idea Gig Performer, or this type of software in general, existed until a few days ago. This is a game changer! What an amazing idea and program. I don’t know much about this company (yet), but I’m a software engineer and you bet your ass I’m gonna be keeping an eye out for job postings on this site :heart_eyes:

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This problem has already been mentioned in another post and I still have no problem with this plugin that I use constantly and that is in almost all my rackspaces (windows 10).
I only activate the internet connection for updates and I had tested it in the previous post with internet connection without any problem either.
Could this be due to interactions with other plugins?

For the record I don’t think either is the issue. I tried with my network connection off and it still works (and still takes the same time to load), and I’m only using the one plugin so it can’t be due to interactions with other plugins. I’m also using Petrucci, not Wong.

And again, to be clear, I’m not even saying this is a negative, I was just making an observation. It loads fine, just takes a bit. Helix Native loads in much less time, but is also not instantaneous.

This is exactly the same issue I posted about several weeks ago in another posting. I am sure that it never used to happen in Windows before, possibly 2 or 3 months ago.

The more I think about it, I think I was just being dumb. I could be wrong, but it seems to me the difference really is just how “friendly” the loading is. If I have a gig with 5 racks and don’t have predicitve loading on it starts up and shows a nice pretty progress bar and I have to wait. If I load the same gig with predictive loading on it starts up and it still loads those 5 racks (or whatever PL is set to), but no progress bar. I still can’t do anything while it loads, and there is no reason to expect it to magically load those racks faster. But you don’t get the feedback that it’s doing anything, and in my case if I click anything windows does the “program not responding”.

Either way it’s probably taking the same time to load the racks. Maybe it would be better to show the progress bar for the loading when predictive loading is on?

With predicitive load the time to load the complete gig is much faster,
But it depends on how you set predicitve load.
When it is set to 20 for a gig with 25 rackspaces it is not as fast as when it is set to 3.

you should be able to see red bars turning to green in the rackspace view as items are loaded