#APPLE MAINSTAGE LIVE LOOPING FREE#

This way, I can be looping keys and guitar while a vocalist sings through mainstage without having her voice caught up in my looping. I have mapped multiple buttons to the mutes on these tracks allowing me prevent certain audio from going to the loopers. This feeds your playing into the loopers. On these tracks, I also have a send setup at 0db to feed the 'looping bus'. These all take inputs from separate buses and their output feeds the main output. I also have an aux track at the set level for each type of instrument I have (keys, guitar, drum pads, vocals). It helps to set up one track the way you want, test it, then copy it multiple times. These tracks have an input from a bus I call the 'looping bus' and their output to the main outputs. I have 6 looper track each with an individual Loopback plugin. All monitoring on the loops need to be turned off, otherwise you would hear your instruments on 6 different channels.Īll looper tracks need to be created at the set level by clicking on the set in the left hand column. The length of the loopers needs to be turned all the way down so it displays '-' allowing you to set the length of the loop when recording it. I have the loopers set sync to the click and quantize to the bar. This is great because with one button press you can switch to a different song section. When you are playing back one of the groups, and hit record or playback on a looper from another group, the first one will stop playing and the new one will begin. This gives me three song sections to work with. 3 of my loopers are set to separate groups A, B and C.

I use pretty simple settings but I will attempt to explain them here. The actual looping plugin is called 'Loopback'. Hitting record two beats before the loop kicks in really frees you up to think about the performance instead of trying to perfectly time all your button presses.

Loop Quanitization - By using a click (and tap tempo) I can have my loops quantized exactly the way I need them.

My main use for this is to have looper bypass for individual parts so that I can do things like play a multi loop solo on one keyboard while adding to the loop with another.

#APPLE MAINSTAGE LIVE LOOPING FREE#

Routing Control - Mainstage is a basically a giant mixer that can host plugins, so I'm free to route audio how I want.

Recall - With Mainstage, I can save my guitar/key sounds directly with the concert and not have to remember which sounds go with which songs.

The other 3 loops are free to come in and out and can contain things such as drums or pads/drones so that I can bring drums in and out of songs to add more dynamics to a looping performance. This allows for automatic switching between sections such as verse, chorus and bridge.

3 of these are song sections (or groups in loopback terminology) A, B, C.

Multiple Song Sections - My current mainstage 'concert' has 6 loopback channels.

First I want to explain the problems it solves for me, then I'll get to the details of how I implemented it. Usually I find a new tool (Boss RC20, Ableton w/ Launchpad, Ableton with pedalboard, Custom Looper in PD, Custom Looper in ChucK, you get the picture), get excited while setting it up, try a few songs and then move on to something else, but this time I think I found a solution that solves most of my problems using Apple's Mainstage and the Loopback plugin. I have been been trying to find a good looping setup for multi-instrumental live performance for a while.

Apple mainstage live looping