Live performance with Mainstage 2

In order to perform my upcoming piece, Moon, Tides, Cycles, I needed to find a way to process the sound coming from a miked piano in two different ways and control two parameters of each sound, volume and panning, with an external controller. The ideal program for this, I’ve found, is Mainstage 2. MainStage is a versatile performance tool that comes with Logic Studio 9. You can use it for everything from looping performances to launching backup tracks to mixing multiple audio sources live through one laptop. It’s pretty awesome.

When I originally made the recording of “Moon, Tides Cycles” for a choreographer last year, I had no intention of ever having the piece played live. I simply took several takes of a recording I made on my piano in my living room using Sound Forge and imported it into Sony Vegas Pro to edit. Copying the track three times, I processed one of these tracks using Guitar Rig 3′s ring modulation module, using a wicked sounding preset called Shifting Tone. Another channel I attached Absynth to one of the effect buses as an effect instead of an actual instrument, and used a preset called Agitated Quiescence. The last channel, I left unprocessed except for some basic normalization and EQ. The two processed channels got faded in and out and panned in various ways following the contour and dynamics of the piece. And then I mastered the whole thing and gave it to her to playback during the dance performance. Here’s the original recording:

Almost a year later, I’m planning on having the piece performed without the dance and am facing some unique challenges. In order to process the piano live, I was going to need something that could handle mixing multiple channels of audio and running two separate plugins at the same time, while also allowing me to map panning and volume controls for those channels to an external controller. So I bought a Macbook Pro for starters and decided I could use my M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard with its multiple knobs and faders as the controller. From what I’d heard about MainStage’s versatility and functionality, it seemed this was the way to go vs. using Sony Vegas Pro or Logic.

Setting it all up was a breeze. First I set up all my equipment, Macbook Pro, Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1, M-Audio Axiom 49 keyboard, Groove Tubes GT55 mic, stand, piano, brain.

Then, I opened MainStage and chose the empty mixer template.

I won’t be needing all of the channels that are in this template but for ease of setup I decided to go with this one. Eventually, I deleted some of the unused channels. All I need to do is add two input channels, each coming from the first input on my interface, and add Guitar Rig as an insert to one of them, and then add Absynth as an insert on the other one.

The Absynth plugin I set to the Agitated Quiescence preset (see my blog about how I had to tweak Absynth) and I added to the Guitar Rig rack the High White Amp using the Clean preset as well as the Ring Modulator effect added and set to the Shifting Tone preset.

Next I had to map the volume and panning for each channel that I would need to control. For this, I went to the layout tab which you will find in the top left corner of the screen. Along the bottom of the screen, there are several types of buttons, knobs, faders and meters that you can drag to the blank space above and position as you wish. I needed two faders and a knob. Eventually I even added volume meters.

The knob is to pan the Guitar Rig bus left and right and the two faders are volume for Guitar Rig and for Absynth. I did not bother to add a panning knob for the Absynth channel because it will not be panned during the performance.

Now that I have my knobs and faders, I need to map them to my M-Audio keyboard’s controls.

For each knob and fader, I had to select them individually, which opened the Screen Control Inspector. In this dialogue, for each knob/fader, I had to set the Type to Absolute so that it would have a range instead of its default which was Single Value (i.e. on and off being the only two positions available). Next, I selected the Learn button. With this button latched you can select the faders and knobs individually on your screen and then twiddle the knob on your keyboard you would like to use for each and Mainstage will automatically detect them and remember them each time you open the program with your hardware attached.

Now my computer is all set up to perform my piece, “Moon, Tides, Cycles.” I have miked the piano and run it through two different effects which I can fade in and out and pan left and right as needed throughout the performance using the controls on my keyboard. All with the help of MainStage.

Author: timdaoust