
This kind of arrangement is ideal for everyone, because the house MBP has all the alerts turned off and I don’t have to risk mine traveling with it.

Literally all I needed was my IEMs and a jump drive with my MainStage template on it, along with my phone to control my monitor mix. I’ve even seen a house controllers paired with a house MacBook Pro, configured with Dante Virtual sound card tied directly to the house mixing board. If you’re going to buy a house keyboard, these makes the most sense to me (and I’ll be so bold as to buck conventional wisdom and say I don’t think that needs to be an 88 note instrument).
#Mainstage dante virtual soundcard software#
They are made for controlling MainStage or other software instruments. These guys produce no sound of their own, and only have MIDI and USB connections to them. The fourth quadrant of keyboards is the MIDI Controller. It probably makes sense to think of hardware keyboards in terms of three main categories: Workstations, Stage Pianos, and Synthesizers. The Intuitive Keys templates are my attempt at 1) bringing the very best out of stock MainStage, and 2) configuring it in a highly efficient manner, with the ultimate goal of actually making us all better live keyboardists.Ĭhoosing the hardware keyboard or MainStage Template really depends on what you have and what you need. So what is a MainStage template? While MainStage has almost a limit-less potential (based on CPU / RAM and the way it is is configured), MS still comes very much in a raw and un-tamed form. The price is absolutely astounding for the capability it brings. MainStage is the logical conclusion of this story, and really has an almost fairy-tale ending to it. It also can play host to 3rd party virtual instruments (such as Valhalla DSP effects or Native Instruments Pianos). Bottom line: if you consider a modern laptop a sunk cost, virtual instrument are a no-brainer great deal.Īpples MainStage replaces a rack of hardware keyboard synths, with a bunch of virtual instruments and effects built right in.
#Mainstage dante virtual soundcard upgrade#
The beauty and efficiency of virtual instruments is: upgrades are easy, we can run multiple instances of the exact same virtual instrument at the same time (try that with your hardware keyboard), and virtual instrument work better whenever we upgrade our computer – something we routinely do anyway. Since we have a powerful computer right here, maybe all we really need is the software to run on that computer? The virtual instrument was born. The next thing we realized were that keyboard brains were really just computers running software.

As long as it had MIDI-in and Audio-out, all we really needed to add to that was our favorite feeling keyboard, as a controller, and we could control as many of these rack-mounted keyboards as we wanted. But the key-beds were taking up a lot of studio space when mostly what we needed were the brains. Once we were layering instruments, we started to realize that a keyboard (or synth) is really just a brain making sound, driven by a key-bed telling the brain which notes to make sound for.
