How many musicians can mainstage support at once?

I was wondering the same thing. For example, could it run a guitarist playing Guitar Rig 3 and a keyboardist playing a synth at the same time? Could a guitarist equipped with a MIDI pickup play both a synth and guitar sound at the same time?

Also, similar to the above's question, what kind of hardware would be required to run a bassist, at most two guitarists, at most three vocalists, and a keyboard rack at the same time? Is that bordering on Mac Pro ground?

Also, what kind of sound card would be good to use live (Firewire 800)? There'd need to be a whole load of inputs and outputs...

Message was edited by: G.9

I've used a vocal, guitar and two keyboards. In logic I've run 3 keyboards at once.

The only limitation is the patch changing. If someone needed to switch a patch, the others would switch as well, so you would need to make their patches stay the same in the new patch. Don't know what problems this might cause.

Tracks are limited by your cpu power. I'd imagine you could do what you are describing pretty easily.

You are putting all your eggs in one basket with this - if mainstage were to crash. I hesitate running guitars through it for this reason. We did backup tracks through EXS24 and they had an intermittent problem with just stopping, hopefully 'playback' will fix this.

Concerning the hardware - firewire 800 would be good. Or something with some DSP on it.

My presonus firebox has been handling 2 inputs fine and could do 6.

I believe that latency is your biggest problem and that is a factor of your CPU speed, so you'll want the fastest processor you can get.

NIN uses G5 towers...

You could run everyone through the same system, but you would have to go EXTREMELY light on the effects. Amp designer itself takes up a large amount of CPU power. It's been said in this forum in the past that MainStage is really designed to handle one computer per person, so they can each individually control patches (since one patch doesn't necessarily correspond to one song -- you can switch back and forth between different sounds mid-song). You will probably be much happier if you can afford to use one computer per person.

If you were using a Mac Pro, you could stack on more effects, but seven people on a single computer system is probably too much cpu power if you want different effects on each channel strip.

It's not really intended for multiple musicians, but you could make it work.

The patch changing seems pretty fast in MS2, but you'd have to see how it worked with multiple people playing during the change.

About the risk you are taking by putting your whole band through the computer - there is always a chance that mainstage will crash or glitch and it's probably more likely the more you stress the machine. Make sure you have a backup plan - maybe another guitar plugged into an amp that you can play with your drummer while someone fixes up the computer. I had to restart mainstage once during a performance and it was probably one of the most uncomfortable silences in my life 🙂

Professional keyboardists who use mainstage will sometimes have two laptops set up for redundancy.

I'm not bashing mainstage, you just have to be realistic - +you will have a problem with a computer setup.+

I see... thank you all for your responses.

kselbee wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. 1 computer per person is definitely not doable. Maybe this isn't really the route to go.

Ive notice Apple put a template for a 4 and 8 track mixer (or something similar), which means you could mix many inputs together. The problem with what you would like is using software effects as well which would give the cpu a run for its money, and probably cause some latency. Give it a few years and you probably will be able to run your whole band through MainStage 3 or 4 and on a quadcore notebook with 8GB of RAM. 😉

-Blake

MainStage is designed to be used by only one musician, but that musician can play as many instruments at the same time as there is CPU available.

As others already mentioned: switching between patches will affect all instruments. And while the switch itself is seamless and very very fast, it will affect all your co-players.

There is a possible work-around for e.g. a keyboarder and a guitar player. Put all the guitar staff (channel strips, mappings) on the set level and let the guitar player switch his effects on/off via bypass mappings (e.g. the pedal board).

Then put the different keyboard sounds in patches inside the set. The keyboarder can then switch patches without effecting the guitar player at all.

Just for kicks, can someone answer this question?

Mac Pro: 32GB RAM and two 2.93ghz Quad Core... so maximum.

Could that run, without latency, a band like so: three vocalists, two guitarists, one bassist, one keyboard rack, background drums/samples, all with their own effects?

Well, you will always have latency with anything digital, because latency is introduced in the analog to digital process... so I guess the answer technically would be no?

That's why some audio interfaces advertise zero latency monitoring -- they achieve this by routing the input via analog directly to your monitoring out. Any audio interface that has digital mixing/effects will introduce latency.

I see... thanks for the clarification.

Well, for me Mainstage 1 worked quite nicely since it came out for just this. I've basically been using it as a live digital mixer, with 2 Presonus Firepods as an aggregate device. My 2.6ghz MBP with 4gb was able to do 4 vocals, with individual compression, and 2 acoustic guitars, & 1 upright bass. Also, playing back exs24 samples with a fcb1010. Was able to use 48k, 128 buffer. Latency was noticeable by me (because I knew it was there), but the rest of the band said they couldn't tell. Set up to send a monitor mix to 2 wedges, and another to in ear monitors. All worked fine, until Mainstage 2 ... you can see my other thread about maxed CPU for info on that.....basically unusable now. So, MS1 = yep, MS2 = maybe (but not for me yet)