Holding a pad while playing in Mainstage?

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Level 1

16 points

Holding a pad while playing in Mainstage?

So I am new to trying out Mainstage, I previously played just using logic live and one thing I liked was that I could play a pad and hold the sustain pedal then switch to another track and that pad would sustain until I clicked back over to that track. I used this often to create an ambiance while playing lead parts over the pad part. My question with mainstage is that I have created several patches but when I switch patches while holding the sustain pedal down it does not hold that chord, it just fades away. Is there a hold function or a way to make this happen in mainsatge?

2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and MacBook Pro 2.7 GHz Core i7, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 19, 2011 9:51 AM

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Answer 1

carsimm

Level 1

5 points

Apr 5, 2011 7:50 PM in response to Aaron Ape

You can set up how long a previous patch sounds in your preferences.
That can give you more smooth transitions.

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Answer 2

Apr 7, 2011 10:43 PM in response to Aaron Ape

No, unless you get a little inventive.

Start with a patch with your two channel strips, the drone and the lead.

You could map your drone to one of your very lowest keys on your keyboard. This will probably be to low so you'll need to pitch it up (transpose) inside MainStage - map that to your drone naturally. Then you split the keyboard at the top of your drone range and map that to the channel strip for your solo.

Now the challenge is to figure out how to keep that low note on. Of course you could just hold the note down, but that's no fun. You could map a foot controller to it, but extra hardware isn't much fun to lug...unless you're already using something.

Ok, a couple minutes of messing around and I got it. Drop a foot pedal from the palette and map that to your sustain pedal.

Switch to the edit view and highlight that pedal. Also highlight your drone channel strip. In the Screen Control Inspector, click on the Unmapped tab
then...
Drone(or whatever your instrument is name) >> MIDI Controller >> 64 (Sustain)

That should map your pedal to the drone only, so you can step on it and not affect your lead. Hope that works out for you.

Sam

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