As music directors and pit musicians, we sometimes encounter situations where there isn’t a sound engineer to make everything sound nice and coherent. I’ve been in quite a few productions where my own personal amplifier was used as a monitor and as a PA for the house. If you’re tucked inside the wing of a small theatre, this can be an absolute nightmare. There’s nothing like boomy sub-bass frequencies in small enclosed spaces. Here’s a quick tip to get a cleaner mix by filtering out those unneeded bass frequencies.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Using Aliases
In Apple MainStage, aliases are linked shortcuts to a sound patch that can be reused, without the need for new instances of the instrument and plugins used on the channel strip. They are extremely useful for reoccurring sounds, and help to reduce CPU load and RAM usage.
Say you have an acoustic piano patch that shows up in every single song. Instead of creating a unique patch for each instance, you can use an alias to tell MainStage…”Hey, just take this earlier piano patch and use it here!”. This means there won’t be any duplicate instances of effects on the piano patch taking up resources.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Filtering Controllers
By default, MIDI controllers such as sustain pedals, expression pedals, and modulation wheels affect every channel strip in a patch. Sometimes it’s useful to be able to filter out certain controllers in a patch. Apple MainStage lets you do the channel strip level. I’ve been programming keyboards in MainStage for a production of Bat Boy over the past few weeks. One of the patches in the Keyboard 2 book calls for winds over strings. I try not to use the sustain pedal when playing strings, but I have to in this situation. There’s a page turn in the middle of a held string chord. I only wanted the sustain pedal to affect the strings, so I had to filter out the sustain pedal for the wind channel strips. Here’s how I did it. It’s really simple.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — The Importance of Panning
An often overlooked part of creating sound patches in Apple MainStage is panning individual instruments across the stereo image. Sample libraries are usually recorded from center perspective. If your sound patch consists of strings, flutes, clarinets, and a celeste, it’s going to sound pretty muddy if they’re all sounding from center perspective. Panning is the process of moving sounds across the stereo image, and it will help you create better sounding patches.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Pitch Bends in EXS24
I programmed keyboards in Apple MainStage for a production of The Wedding Singer two years ago. In “Saturday Night in the City,” the Keyboard 2 book starts off with a huge synth lead pitch bend from to A2 to A5, and then another pitch bend from A5 to D6. EXS24’s standard pitch bend parameters allow bending up one octave, and bending down three octaves. Take a look at this screenshot of the EXS24 interface.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Customizing Velocity Curves
There are 128 velocity values in the MIDI specification, and these values range from 0 to 127. When a virtual instrument is played, 128 different volumes that theoretically be achieved. Sometimes, changing the response (velocity curve) of an virtual instrument makes them easier or more expressive to play. Here’s an example of an Apple MainStage velocity graph.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Creating Sound Patches
In musical theatre, a sound patch refers to one or more sounds grouped into one playable entity. Different sounds within the patch can also be layered on top of each other, or split at different points across the keyboard. Creating, layering, and splitting sound patches in Apple MainStage is really easy. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating and manipulating software instrument sound patches in MainStage’s “Edit” window.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Using a Global Reverb
When programming sound patches for musical theatre productions, one should strive for efficiency. A CPU and RAM footprint is integral to the stability of Apple MainStage. Reverb, short for reverberation, is the repetition of a sound as a result of sound waves reflecting off different surfaces. Many people refer to reverb as “echo.” Regardless of what you want to call it, reverb plugins eat up CPU power. Take a look at the following screenshot.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Getting Started
Apple MainStage used to be part of Logic Studio, which was $499. Now, it’s available as a standalone app on the App Store for $29. It’s possibly the best deal in music software history. After you buy and install MainStage, click “Download Additional Content” under “MainStage” in the menu bar. These are free sounds that can be used in MainStage. I recommend only downloading the instruments and not the Apple Loops. The download will take a while, so let’s talk about a few other pieces of equipment you’ll need for a functional musical theatre setup.
MainStage for Musical Theatre — Submixing Sound Patches
Do you find yourself constantly changing the volume of every single channel strip in your patches during tech week? How do you mix your sound patches when programming keyboards for a musical theatre production? You probably use a combination of common sense and the “I’ll use the cast recording as a reference” method. Here’s another tool you can take advantage of while programming. It’s called a submix, and here’s how it works.