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Running MainStage on PC?


Shawn T

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I am the black sheep with my worship team. I am of course one of the only people running PC. We have talked about using MainStage, I know its an Apple/Mac app but I have heard its possible to use in PC but I have been able to find next to no information on how to do that.  Does anyone here have experience with that? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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You can use Top Ten Software's Cantabile to do the same type of things as Main Stage.

Cantabile presents all your virtual-instruments and plugins as a virtual Rack of gear.

You use Scenes (similar to a multi-patch) to setup advanced splits/layers.

You can remap/scale controllers, etc.

 

You may also want to look at Ableton Live.

Lots of worship teams us Live.

  • Advanced click-tracks (clicks, count-downs, sections called out)
  • Tempo can be stored with each song
  • Can host virtual-instruments and can be programmed to seamlessly switch between advanced splits/layers
  • Can be programmed to disable unused virtual-instruments for each song (greatly conserving CPU)
  • If a worship team member is absent; you can have all parts prepared in Live (muted)... and just un-mute the needed part
  • Virtual-Instruments can be played live
  • Samples can be triggered live

 

Watch some videos showing worship teams using Live.

Pretty amazing... 

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I started out with Ableton on PC fully intending to use it every week. It is truly an amazing program for this application of for making your own backing tracks.

This might not be what you wanted to hear but I'll share what happened to me. I invested in a nice PC laptop and Ableton, began using it, Realized I could replace it with something way more intuitive. An iPad with the prime app you can get for free from loopcommunity.com. Buy their tracks for Prime and have everything on a music stand in the iPad. You can change keys, mute/solo parts all in the app.The tracks all have cue and metronome that you route to channel B whilst routing the audio to FOH in channel A. You use earbuds on stage from a stage mix. One track in each ear. Sooooooo much easier than Ableton. By a mile. The only thing I use Ableton for now is mostly new track construction. All tracks in Ableton can be uploaded to Prime app as indivisul tracks. PRIME separates them.

"If" you only want mainstage for the synth sounds. Yeah you can get that in multiple other ways on PC. You could use Sampletank and any other similar program. Alternately go hardware for the bread and butter sounds mostly used in worship music.

Edited by Starise
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After watching those videos, I decided to use Live to trigger samples and play keys at gigs.

It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.

Once everything is configured, switching songs is as easy as pressing a key/button/pad.

Works perfectly for our 4-piece.  We move a lot... and don't want a large keyboard up-front.

I use a Q-Nexus and a 12-Step... to trigger/play the parts.  Super small footprint... but effective to cover "just enough" keys.

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