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MainStage provides a flexible interface for organizing and accessing your sounds in
concerts. Concerts are MainStage documents that hold your sounds—a concert can store
all the sounds you’ll use in an entire performance or a series of performances. In a
MainStage concert, individual sounds are stored as patches, and each patch can contain
one or more channel strips, each with its own instruments and effects. You can add
channel strips, choose channel strip settings, add instruments and effects, and edit their
parameters to customize your sounds. You can even mix channel strips of different types
in a single patch.
You can organize patches in a concert by ordering them in the Patch List and also by
grouping them into sets. Sets are folders where you can store patches you want to keep
together.
Each concert also includes a visual interface, called a layout, with controls that you can
use to modify your patches in live performance. Layouts contain screen controls, which
are onscreen representations of keyboards, faders, knobs, buttons, pedals, drum pads,
and other hardware controls and displays. You make connections between your MIDI
devices and your MainStage concert by assigning hardware controls to the screen controls
in the concert. After you make these controller assignments, you map the screen controls
to channel strip and plug-in parameters, completing the connection so that you can easily
access and manipulate the parameters you want for each patch in the concert. You can
also map screen controls to actions, which provide the ability to select patches, control
the Tuner or metronome, provide visual feedback, and perform other functions.
Parameter
mapping
MainStage screen control Channel strip or
plug-in parameter
Hardware control
Controller
assignment
MainStage lets you quickly and easily make controller assignments and parameter
mappings to speed your workflow. You can customize your layout to match the controls
on your MIDI hardware, to optimize the use of available screen space, or in other ways
that suit your needs.
12 Chapter 1 Introducing MainStage