A Quick History Of How We Built Our Next Gen MainStage 3 Patches
Gather around and we’ll tell the tale of building the most stable, easy to use MainStage patches on earth.
The Problem
At Patch Foundry, our history with MainStage goes back to 2007. But in 2019, we discovered that there were two critical problems with using MainStage that halted development:
1. MainStage was consistently unstable when playing larger, more complicated sets with lots of plugins and control mappings
2. MainStage lacked built-in quality piano samples that were at the level needed for pro users, and became unstable when using third party plugins.
Not one to give up, Eric began a quest to build the most stable, powerful, and best-sounding MainStage patches on the planet.
Building The Template
Eric began by focusing on creating the perfect MainStage template. The perfect template had to have:
• Easy to use onscreen controls that didn’t break when you subbed out instrument channels
• Not too many control mappings to keep MainStage from overloading with multiple midi inputs
• Straightforward and clean interface that was easy to understand
• Option for two keyboards, but rely on the bottom keyboard for most parts
• A large built-in chart viewer with the ability to turn pages
Eric painstakingly built, tested, and then rebuilt from the ground up 48 individual templates, slowly streamlining features.
The end result is a simple but deceptively powerful MainStage template that allowed complete control of organ drawbars and every essential feature. More importantly, it was rock solid and incredibly light on CPU.
Getting The Right Piano Sound
The next major hurdle was getting a pro-grade piano sound out of MainStage. Eric spent months experimenting with the built-in piano samples in MainStage, and finally deciding that the piano samples just weren’t up to the level needed for pro-players.
Eric then set out on an ambitious project: sampling a real acoustic grand piano for MainStage. Eric worked with a team of engineers and tediously deep-sampled a modern grand piano in a studio in Nashville, Tennessee. The process took over 3 months, and at the end, the piano plugin sounded amazing.
But there was still a problem. Even at 350 megabytes, the piano sample was bogging down MainStage 3 when there were 40-50 instances of the sample. This just wouldn’t work for gigging cover band musicians playing large sets. Back to development again.
A year later MainStage 3.7.1 was released, and while digging around, Eric discovered that they had released a new piano plugin. It sounded great, but would it be stable enough to use in MainStage? Eric loaded up dozens of instances, and to his amazement it didn’t slow down MainStage at all.
After a month of carefully using a combination of built-in plugins, the pianos sounded amazing in MainStage for the first time ever with all native plugins.
Stabilizing MainStage
During this process Eric went on a quest to make MainStage nearly crash proof. First, he began testing what plugins used the most CPU and memory, and how to structure patches so they would require the minimum load and be the most stable. Eric crashed MainStage hundreds of times, and carefully took notes about what caused the overload each time.
Eric then painstakingly tested thousands of patch combinations, opting in the end for an incredibly streamlined patch design process that utilized less than 4 audio plugins per channel strip.
Testing In The Wild
The final step was testing the MainStage files across multiple computers and in various environments. Eric tested the finalized files and tested them for months in everything from festival show heat to cold weather using several computers. Each time MainStage would become unstable, Eric would take notes and modify the template and patches and set new computer requirements.
At the end of the beta testing, the MainStage template and patch files recorded zero crashes across all computers for 15 shows in all conditions. Even when Eric stress-tested the template with over 120 patches in a single project, MainStage stayed rock solid and responsive. After 6 years, Patch Foundry’s Cover Band patches were finally ready for the world.