If the sound in your monitors stops suddenly, you really want to know fast whether it’s your hardware, your software, or something wrong with monitoring or FOH. One important issue that never seems to be addressed by developers of audio plugin hosts who don’t actually perform live is the rapid need to diagnose the origin of a problem when you’re on stage. We are both touring musicians and so rather than just having an abstract understanding of the needs of performing musicians, we’ve both been (and still are) there. So, along with my partner, an extremely strong software developer but also a touring guitarist, we decided it was time to create our own audio plugin host that would do exactly what we wanted. If you sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar and start playing, you don’t get distracted by the mechanics of the piano or guitar, you just play. I have a serious technical background in software development but when I am in “music mode”, I don’t WANT to have to care about techie stuff. I’m sure someone will do Gig Performer vs. Incidentally, a consequence of this is that somebody else had to create audio plugin host comparisons for Gig Performer vs. There were a couple of options for Windows only, such as Forte and Cantabile but frankly, I couldn’t even figure out how to get started with either of them. One of the better known, Ableton Live, was interesting, but in spite of its name, it really wasn’t focused on live performance the way I needed it to be, being more song oriented than show oriented. So like coming to a fork in the road, I had to make a choice. A bigger problem was that VST support in MaxMSP was becoming problematic and unreliable, at least for the ways in which I needed to use them. Unfortunately, newer versions of Max were becoming much less reliable and I was forced to stick with MaxMSP version 5 even though newer versions had some really cool features, particularly editing related, that would have been really helpful. It was an ongoing project and it worked sufficiently well that I went on tour several times with that environment. I wrote a 3-part article about how I did this which you can read on our old blog page. My next approach was to implement MainStage functionality using MaxMSP version 5 from Cycling74. However, I soon ran into some very bizarre problems with MainStage, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article but suffice it to say that I just couldn’t get things to work reliably the way I needed. You know, surrounding myself with about 9 keyboards including a Korg Oasys, a Prophet 8, a Moog Voyager, a twin-manual Hammond clone and various MIDI keyboard controllers. At the time, I was still doing the Rick Wakeman/Keith Emerson thing. As a Mac user I was naturally drawn to Apple MainStage, which, at the time, I felt was going to be just perfect for me. The short answer is we needed it ourselves! The long answer is, well, much longer, so read on.Īlthough I was using various MIDI sequencers and DAWs since the 80s, I only got back into live performance about nine years ago.
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