Playing A Sequence or Prerecorded Track in Mainstage

Question

Playing A Sequence or Prerecorded Track in Mainstage

I'm currently in a situation where I need to play back prerecorded material in Mainstage while continuing to perform on an instrument patch.
I need it to be played for a length that is determined by the performance i.e., it's a different length every night.
I currently have loaded the material as an EXS sample and trigger it by playing a note and holding it for the length it needs to be played back.
Here are number of my issues/thoughts/talking points:
1. Rather than holding the note for the entire duration, is there a way to use a note to start the sample and a note (different or the same) to stop it - so that it doesn't need to be held the entire time?
2. Is there a way to map the transport functions (e.g. Play, Stop, Pause, etc.) to play back a sample in Mainstage?
3. Is there a way to play back a sequence in Mainstage? It would be great to have access to variable tempos and time compression/expansion of audiofiles in Mainstage, similar to Ableton Live.
4. What about the Audio File Player? Is there a way to map the transport functions (e.g. Play, Stop, Pause, etc.) to control these functions? I haven't been to figure out how.
5. Is there an efficient way to use Logic in a live context rather than Mainstage to solve these problems?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 8:39 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 8, 2008 2:58 PM in response to Vijay Tellis-Nayak

Download SooperLooper. It has a load function for pre-recorded loops.

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Answer 2

Oct 15, 2008 7:40 AM in response to Vijay Tellis-Nayak

Hi,

There is a little trick that can really help and worked very fine for me on some occasion.
Use Ultrabeat with midi note pattern triggering after loading up to 24 samples per Ultrabeat occurence.
The samples have to be no longer than the maximum lenght of a pattern, but it will then perfectly loop until either you trigger another sequence, OR you trigger the same sequence again, which stops it instantly.

If you need more than 24 samples for one song, you can do the same thing twice,; but in that case, triggering samples from the 2nd occurrence of Ultrabeat can be tricky.. but it's very doable with a little habit...

And you can do the the trick for every song in your concert, so it's not so bad.
The drawback is loading samples in Ultrabeat is a pain, and you have to make EXS24 programes with your samples firts to be able to import into Ultrabeat..

And if you need to playback some sort of musical backgroud, you should have a look in the Script section of Mainstage, where you can have itunes play stéréo files in background while playing mainstage? there are some limitations (no sync, no click) but it ca help too, I think..

Cheers,

JL

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