Re: Mainstage worthwhile?

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:10 AM, r.domain <rdomain@gmail.com> wrote:

Finally you map Mainstage's Screen Control Objects to the target software
parameters. In this process you may apply lots of scaling, reversing, cross
fading, multiple mapping etc to trim the setup according to your physical
control gear.

I was wondering if you could expand on this idea and the benefits.  This is a part I haven't delved into too much with Mainstage. 

Scaling is one of the most essential techniques for live performing with electronics. A physical MIDI controller usually sends either two events, on or off, or it sends one of 128 continuous values for a parameter. But you may need a different range to effectively play certain electronic parameters in the box. A typical example is if you have an Autofilter on a loop track output and use this for aggressive resonance tone and now you want to play the resonance from a knob or expression pedal. The range of the resonance parameter where "things come alive" may be like fiver percent of this parameters total range. You would never be able to make music with a pedal or knob that goes all the way. So then you scale the range of the physical control gear to match the range that is musically interesting in the software. 

Another example is if you want to use a MIDI expression pedal to control different parameters, maybe even different plugins? Then you simply create as many screen control objects you need and scale them for different unique targets. For example, at the toe-down position you may want a short delay to become active and go into 100% feedback (to freeze audio) and then as you back off the pedal, toe-upwards, you may want a filter to cut off high end and at the same time compensate the musically experienced "level" by a scaled increase in volume. Stuff like that is much quicker to set up in Mainstage 2 than in Mainstage 1.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen 
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com