From jackoverfull@gmail.com Mon Feb 06 14:56:57 2012
Subject:Mainstage - First impressions

Well, I finally managed to find about an hour to toy with my most recent acquisition: Mainstage (thanks, bobby, for letting us know that is now available separately from Logic Pro).

First point: it requires a lot of disk space. More than you would think is needed to finish the installation, actually: every time I launched the application it downloaded the sounds, "installed" them and just quit, no error, then began again to download the 2 gbs the next time I launched it. freeing about 8 GBs solved the problem.

So far i installed only the "Essential Content". it wouldn't be a bad thing if it there was a quick way to see what's in every additional package…Or actually to have the option to install single instruments.

At this point I connected the Mojo and started playing around with the sounds…
I'm _very_ impressed with the pianos and some of the other keyboards. The pianos of garageband were OK, but these ones are great (and basically every other keyboard in GB was quite cheesy).
Also, some of the synths are a joy to play (and i usually hate synths…).

The EVB3 organ probably wasn't bad when it came out in the early '00s, now has been surpassed basically by every clone on the market, both software and hardware (on this point, I always wondered why Guido named his software "VB3": in the beginning, a couple of years ago, i thought it was the same software…). The leslie simulator is probably the weakest point, even the B4 one sounds better to me. And there is a lot of leakage and no way to control it (or at least i could not find one). Funny thing: I recognized the VB3 sound immediately when I started playing, I remember hearing it on some recordings from some years ago, the leslie simulator is unmistakable.
The distortion is surprisingly good when set to high levels, this emulator would probably appeal to many hard rock players.

The leslie switch on my Mojo and the sustain and expression pedals were recognized automatically, I could assign the other controls to various functions, some are mapped already and need to be remapped to be used properly. A midi learn feature would be the best way to accomplish mapping but I can't see it. The two manuals were recognized without problems (no surprise here) and can work independently with some instruments, like some synths and all the organs.

I was quite impressed with an interesting feature of the split keyboard function…Let's say, for example, you're playing a piano patch on the right side of the keyboard and a bass one on the left side (actually a preset available from the beginning): when you do an upward bass run that ends -possibly by accident- in the piano area the software will automatically understand you actually intended to trigger bass notes and actually keep using the bass sound. Same thing happens when you do a downward scale with the piano patch: the bass section of the keyboard will shrunk and you'll still be playing piano for more or less an octave more than what you set in the software.
This feature is probably not perfect but it can probably solve many possible errors (if you use split you know that sometimes you can unconsciously forget that there is no bass pedal note _there_) and be used consciously in some situation. i'd like to see something similar on the Mojo in a future firmware update.

Anyway, i'm not playing live with a computer anymore, just wanted to give this a try, since the price was that low, it can be a great software. If I'll ever come back to playing live with my mac i'll probably use it, until then I'll probably keep using garageband for my small home studio need (also because Mainstage is built for live: it has no recording features…).