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What is MainStage?
MainStage is a music application designed for use in live performance. MainStage turns your
computer into a powerful multi-instrument and eects processor that you can use on stage
when you perform. Whether you sing or play a keyboard, guitar, or another instrument, you can
use MainStage when you perform live.
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Using a USB or MIDI keyboard controller, you can play a wide variety of software instruments,
including pianos and other keyboards, synthesizers, strings, horns, percussion, and more.
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If you play electric guitar, you can play through virtual amps and use eects such as overdrive,
reverb, and compression.
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Vocalists, drummers, and other musicians can sing and play with multi-eects setups using
a microphone.
In MainStage, you organize and access your sounds in concerts. 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 eects. You can add channel strips, choose channel strip settings, add
instruments and eects, and edit their parameters to customize your sounds. You can even mix
channel strips of dierent types in a single patch.
You organize patches for a concert in the Patch List, which includes grouping them into sets,
which are folders where you can store patches you want to keep together.
Each concert includes a visual interface, called a layout, with screen controls that you use to
modify your patches in live performance. Screen controls include 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, then map the screen controls to channel strip and plug-in
parameters, completing the connection so you can easily manipulate the parameters for each
patch in the concert.
Parameter
mapping
MainStage screen control
Channel strip or
plug-in parameter
Hardware control
Controller
assignment
Introducing MainStage
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