Making my Mainstage template…

There is a vast amount of information in videos and blogs about Mainstage so the purpose of this blog entry is, not to add to the cacophony, but to begin to chronicle how I have come to use it myself. I have been planning on using it to perform live electronic music for quite some time now so I’ve been excited to make headway in dissecting and deciphering it. I hope to eventually put together a few step by step processes for doing certain things like creating a template, which is what I will talk about today.

I spent a good amount of time putting together a template to map Mainstage to my M-Audio Axiom 49 and set up a concert in Mainstage through which I could play keyboards and guitar and have the capability to loop as well.

First, I set up my channel strips. I opened up a template for keyboards that was blank and added an audio channel to it for my guitar. Then, I added two separate buses with loopback plugins (select an insert and on the drop down menu choose, under delay, Loopback). I then routed the guitar and keyboard each to their own loopback bus. Additionally, I added a channel with a playback plugin as the input. If you know how to use Logic this should be pretty intuitive.

Above you can see that I have the eight drum pads laid out, as well as the 8 knobs and 9 faders that all correspond to my M Audio’s controls. In addition I have three waveforms, one for the playback plugin and two for the loopback plugins (one of those is mapped to my keyboard and the other to my guitar channel). Below each, I placed four buttons, which cover the basic controls that I felt I would need. For the loopback plugins, record, play, undo and clear. For the playback plugin, Play, stop, next marker and start from the beginning. Additionally, I figured a CPU meter and a VU meter would be beneficial. Beside the keyboard is a mod wheel as well. I may add more when I get an idea of what I tend to use most.

I mapped the faders to each of the channel volumes and the knobs to various parameters of the Massive plugin (filters, oscillators, etc.). The drum pads are not being used for much at the moment except that, one of them, I’ve mapped it to the play function for the playback plugin (which has a drum loop loaded in it).

You can find all of these elements, buttons, meters and faders, in the Screen Control Palette in the Layout mode (top left corner of the screen). To map them to the keyboard, all you need to do is, while still in Layout mode, select any control and switch on the Learn button. Anything you touch on your keyboard will be instantly mapped to whatever is selected. Just go through each control like this until you are satisfied. In order to map the buttons to parameters, such as play, record, volume, etc., all you need to do is, while in Edit mode, select a control and either switch on the map parameter button (in the Patch Inspector dialogue below the main view screen) and simply move whatever controls in the channel strips or in one of your plugins that you want to map the control to. Or you can go through the lists in the Patch Inspector dialogue to find whatever you need.

Eventually, I will add separate patches for each song that I will perform. This is easy to do in the patch list on the left side of the screen. Hopefully, this should get you started making your own template to correspond to the controls for your own MIDI keyboard.

Author: timdaoust