Introduction Many DAWs come with their own collection of proprietary plugins. As an end user, I generally never use proprietary plugins because doing so locks one into a particular eco-system and also makes it difficult to collaborate with other musicians who have a different DAW. Nevertheless, with...
Gig Performer is designed to be a very flexible host to allow you not only to create your sounds but also to perform, in real time, on stage or in a studio. We’re not talking about playing 8 bars with one sound, stopping to switch...
It looks like this or it looks like that...
You need an internet connection to activate (but not to actually use) your Gig Performer trial and then again to activate a full license. Once you have activated Gig Performer on your computer, you can run it without an internet connection and quite frankly we...
Gig Performer is notarized by Apple and can be opened in Catalina. As of version 3.6, Gig Performer itself runs perfectly fine in Catalina. You will most likely be prompted to allow access to the Microphone and you must allow this. The prompt is a little...
Guest post by Gig Performer user Jim Erwin — Keyboard player with The Suburbans Best Practices (okay...
Generally, if you update an Audio Unit, you have to log out or possibly even reboot your computer before the updated AU becomes visible. If you don’t do this, the old AU will still be registered and so Gig Performer will not find the new...
Many DAWs come with a collection of (often very good) proprietary plugins for synthesis and sampling. However, proprietary plugins have one major disadvantage. They lock you into the DAW in which they live. If you ever need to share your tracks with others, or you...
Input and output ports in Gig Performer blocks If you’re already a Gig Performer user, you know that you can easily route audio and MIDI between plugins by just connecting them visually. However, you may have wondered why some plugin blocks display so many ports. Although most...
(This is an English translation of a German article written by Lukas Ruschitzka that first appeared on July 23rd, 2019 in Pianoo.de) Play with Gig Performer Piano VST: host software in live use Gig Performer is a cross platform software application for Windows and MacOS. Gig...
A minor bug was introduced into GP 3.5 where the caption field could be edited even if the “Customize caption” checkbox was not checked. This will be fixed in the next update. The workaround is simple, just remember to check the “Customize caption” checkbox before...
One of our users, @progloverfan, posted this helpful tip on our forums for Windows users that may be helpful to anyone trying to tweak their PC to make it more efficient. Here’s a copy of what he wrote Guys, If you are experiencing crack, pops and/or clicks...
For users coming to Gig Performer from other hosts, there is some confusion as to how to configure Gig Performer so you can use the same set of Program Change (PC) or Control Change (CC) messages for different parts of a song, no matter what...
Yes, unless you’re about to go on tour or are in the middle of one! Here’s the thing — Gig Performer updates are tested thoroughly before they are released so problems with new releases of Gig Performer are very rare. However, it could be that a...
Think of the main view of your DAW containing everything you need for a session as analogous to just one rackspace in Gig Performer. When you switch from one rackspace to another, you are essentially getting a completely new “session” except that in Gig Performer, this...
Gig Performer has been shown to be very reliable in terms of its ability to load plugins (VST2, VST3 and AU (Mac only) from pretty much every plugin developer out there. Plugins from all the major developers (Native Instruments, Arturia, Spectrasonics, Synthogy, Applied Acoustic Systems,...
We use FastSpring to process payments for Gig Performer. As noted on their website, "Customers that are exempt from paying VAT or GST can prevent tax from being collected on their order by providing their valid VAT ID or GST ID at the time of purchase....
If you’re running Mojave (10.14) or newer (e.g, Catalina, 10.15), you need to give Gig Performer permission to use the microphone (I know - you’re using an audio interface, not the microphone, sigh) otherwise no audio will be received by Gig Performer. The first time you...
Gig Performer’s MIDI In Block is not just your everyday block for receiving MIDI events. It can do much more than just receive MIDI messages from an external device and feed them to connected soft-synth plugins. It has important other functionality that often relieves you from...
Depending on how particular plugins needed to be activated, it may be the case that the Gig Performer Plugin scanner was unable to validate it. There are four main reasons this might happen, The plugin is proprietary The plugin is 32-bit The plugin is corrupt ...
This issue mostly happens on Windows with incompatible ASIO drivers but it can also happen if a plugin is unable to handle sample rate changes that occur after that plugin has been loaded Try one of the following 1) Start Gig Performer while holding down the SHIFT...
ASIO4ALL was originally designed to provide low latency support for audio interfaces that did not already support ASIO on Windows systems. However, depending on your configuration, your audio interface and its drivers, ASIO4ALL can either help or hinder. If you are having trouble getting Gig Performer to...
As of Gig Performer 3.x, when you purchase a license, we allow it to be activated three times. The cost of Gig Performer is not based on the number of possible activations, it is based on a "per user" license. It is unfortunate but necessary to...
It's usually convenient to have GP load the last gig file automatically at startup and there's a general option you can check for this to be the default. However, occasionally you may need to temporarily prevent automatic loading. One reason is because you do want...
Among the many new features in Gig Performer 3 is the notion of songs and song parts. To complement this new functionality, the Lemur template has been updated significantly and now supports Setlists Songs and Song parts You can download the new template here. A deeper...
Gig Performer is pretty efficient in terms of CPU cycles but sometimes plugins use up a lot of cycles even when they're (apparently) not doing anything. In a traditional channel strip model, it's pretty straight forward to automatically bypass plugins when the channel strip fader...
Symptom: After downloading the trial version of Gig Performer, a blank dialog pops up and there's nothing to click on. Background: This issue has only been reported a couple of times. From our investigation, this appears to be some kind of incompatibility between GPU acceleration and...
We want to do our very best to support every Gig Performer user. For general help with using Gig Performer, tips and tricks, ways to develop ever more sophisticated gigs, our community forums should be your first stop. Do a search there first and if...
The short answer is we needed it ourselves! The long answer is, well, much longer, so read on. Although I was using various MIDI sequencers and DAWs since the 80s, I only got back into live performance about nine years ago. As a Mac user I...
If you are running Gig Performer on a Windows machine, your plugins can be installed in arbitrary locations specified by the plugin developer and/or modified by you. In either case, if some of your plugins do not show up in Gig Performer, you will need...
Quick answer - if you’re using Gig Performer, it’s pretty trivial. I never used side chaining myself. In fact I wasn’t even sure what it was for a long time. But I got forced into find out a few days when a potential customer asked if...
We recently got a question from a user who wanted to be able to switch rackspaces and variations using a Novation Launchpad. However, that product only produces MIDI Note Events but Gig Performer expects Program Change MIDI events so what do you do? While such things...
If you have a particularly high resolution Windows tablet, it may be that some plugins are displayed too small. You can address this by adjusting Window's scaling behavior. Right click on the application icon and click “Properties.” Go over to the Compatibility tab, enable “Override...
(Updated: May 20th, 2018) Synapse has released a new version of The Legend that fixes this issue. Please make sure you are running at least version 1.22 of The Legend. A customer recently reported that Gig Performer was hanging on his Mac when certain rackspaces were selected...
A Windows customer recently reported a problem where they found that they could not listen to their music with apps like Spotify or Pandora while using Gig Performer even though this seemed to work when using other audio hosts or DAWs. If you encounter this situation,...
As a matter of policy, Deskew Technologies, LLC does not participate in any promotional or cross-grade discounted sales of Gig Performer. We feel strongly that discounted pricing serves only to devalue a product and that Gig Performer is fairly priced. We offer a high quality product...
Guest blog written by Greg Nelson Shortly after the turn of the current century, I started to experiment with Virtual Studio Technology, and was very impressed with various software emulations of organs and synthesizers, and sampled pianos. I started to explore the possibility of replacing my...
Check the properties of all of your widgets in the rackspace. Also check the Global MIDI controls. You will most likely discover that you accidentally "learned" either a Note On or a Note Off event. When a MIDI event is learned for the purpose of...
Scenario - Gig Performer is running fine on your Windows machine, an update becomes available, but before you update, you uninstall your current version or an automatic uninstaller removes all references to Gig Performer. Don't do that! We repeat, don't do that! If you do, you will...
Omnisphere supports a mode where it can load several sounds simultaneously so that you can switch from one to another with no delay and with the ability to leave the old sound audible until you release all notes. Of course, Gig Performer's Patch Persist™ facility...
Gig Performer 2 introduced a programming language, GP Script which, while still evolving, will allow users to extra add functionality into Gig Performer. Let’s see a simple example of GP Script in use. Gig Performer supports Tap Tempo, the ability to measure a sequence of taps and...
The Recorder provides a simple way to capture every audio input channel to its own wave file, paving the way to capturing the entire raw performance of a band for later post processing. The feature is aimed mostly at FoH engineers who are using Gig...
The Rig Manager is used to isolate the particular keyboards and or MIDI controllers (MIDI pedal boards, etc) from your actual rackspace setups. The fundamental idea is you name your physical devices in the Rig Manager and you use those names when you are creating...
Major new features in Gig Performer 3 Songs and Setlists ChordPro Support Ableton Link Synchronization Bi-Directional MIDI Widgets Enhanced Remote Support for Lemur MIDI Input Recorder Multi-widget insertion Latency Measurement Tool Gig Performer 3 also includes audio engine enhancements, better plugin editor handling, sysex message support,...
A much requested feature in Gig Performer was a multi-channel gain control plugin so that instead of creating separate gain controls after each synth plugin, you could use a single plugin to control the gain of multiple plugins. Our plugin comes in 8ch (four stereo...
Gig Performer 2 ships with a built-in programming language that can be used to develop very sophisticated behavior for live performance. GPScript gives Gig Performer some "open endedness", providing the ability to add features that are not already built in to the product. A full...
Due to the way that Acoustic Samples B5 exposes host parameters in UVI Workstation/Falcon, Gig Performer 1.x does not properly handle ranges in the AU plugin. For example, if you map a Gig Performer drawbar widget to a drawbar in Acoustic Samples B5, the Gig...
If you have been prompted that an update/upgrade is available but the update fails to install, perhaps with a message such as, “Something went wrong”, then there is most likely a permissions problem on your computer which is preventing the program from being updated. You...
Although we're really busy working on Gig Performer 2.x (more on that later), we put out a minor update to Gig Performer 1.x today where it's now possible to distinguish between NoteOn and NoteOff events in our MIDI Filter plugin. Why is this interesting? Well, turns...
By default, Gig Performer saves the values of all widgets using a "last value" algorithm. That means that when you change a widget value and save your gig, then when you reload your gig, that widget will have the same value. This is very convenient but...
A customer reported that Gig Performer would not learn mixer faders in Superior Drummer 3 (SD3). Thanks to some help from Toontrack which we greatly appreciate, we discovered that SD3 requires an extra step. You cannot simply move any parameter in SD3 and have it...
The normal way to use Gig Performer™ is to create rackspaces each of which contains a collection of plugins connected together as desired. A rackspace might contain everything needed for a single song or you might use several rackspaces during a single song, switching from...
(Yes, there's a video of the complete process at the end of this article so don't be afraid to keep reading!) If you have been watching YouTube videos of people showing you how to play this great song and they're busy playing 8th note chords something like...
A customer, understandably panicked, contacted us to report that after installing the latest update, when he ran Gig Performer he just got an empty rackspace. Also, Gig Performer started a complete scan of his plugins as if they had never been seen before. It was...
If you're trying to control a plugin parameter directly from your physical hardware, you may be tempted to use the plugin's MIDI mechanism, possibly because that's all that was available to you before you started using Gig Performer. However if you're using Gig Performer, you will...
As of version 1.6, Gig Performer can sync to an external MIDI clock, adjusting tempo automatically based on the rate at which MIDI clock events are received. Gig Performer will respond to start and stop MIDI events with the play button turning green for the...
June 12th, 2017 The latest update of Arturia's wonderful plugin collection has changed the way that they restore the state of their plugins when reloaded. Consequently the plugins do not correctly respond to a request from Gig Performer 1.6 to restore their state and so some...
In a crash report recently received, we noted that the message was as follows: Application Specific Information: *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'Couldn't posix_spawn: error 35' We have absolutely no idea what this means. A google search indicates that this error is occasionally produced...
If you have multiple instruments inserted into a single Kontakt instance, you can easily route each instrument its own audio output pair so that you can subsequently route each instrument through different effects in Gig Performer. The easy way to do that is to insert...
While plugins often support directly MIDI learning, when you're using a plugin with a host such as Gig Performer, the preferred way to control plugin parameters is through host automation. Unfortunately, Keyscape does not enable host automation support by default and in fact you actually...
OS X has a nice built-in feature called IAC (Inter-app Communication) that allows you to connect MIDI applications together and communicate with each other. (There's nothing built into Windows but there are third party applications like virtualMIDI that do the same kind of thing.) However, there...
We released version 1.5.2 a few days ago but we continue to move full steam ahead designing and implementing numerous other features that we (and customers) want to see in Gig Performer. One item that was requested a long time ago was a master volume control...
This feature just saved my a-- !!! Seriously! I'm getting ready to go on a tour in Japan with the Security Project. My main laptop is a 5 year old Macbook Pro with a 17" screen. It has 16Gb RAM and SSDs instead of hard drives...
If you wish to move an existing Gig Performer installation to another machine, apart from your gig files, or if you need to perform a Windows Restore to revert to a previous Windows installation, or if you are upgrading your operating system, you will need...
As mentioned on our various blog posts, we sometimes recommend 3rd party tools and applications that we feel will be beneficial to our users. In most cases, we will have worked with such tools ourselves, so our suggestions are not just based on our having read about...
If you're on a Mac, there's a great app out there called OSCulator that can be used to transform pretty much any input to any output. For example, you can configure it to receive MIDI notes and have it send keystrokes (yes, that's right, as...
When you normally configure OSC settings so that Gig Performer can communicate with your control surface such as Lemur or TouchOSC running on your iPad, you will generally specify the IP address of your iPad in Gig Performer's OSC configuration. Here's an example where 192.168.0.31 represents...
I love Kontakt! It was the key that allowed me to stop having to carry a Korg Kronos with me on tour along with my other controllers (I love the Kronos as well but it's so darn heavy.) If you load a Kontakt instrument, particularly one with...
A customer noticed that Gig Performer seemed to be responding poorly at times and after investigation discovered that under some circumstances it looked like Gig Performer was writing many many megabytes of data to the hard drive when changing from one rackspace to another. The...
In the Windows world, plugin developers are free to install their plugins anywhere. So for Gig Performer to find them, you have to tell it in which folders to look. To do this, follow these steps: Open the Plugin Manager, which can be found under...
Depending on your settings, when you try to install Gig Performer on Windows, you may see a dialog one or more of the following: The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software This file does not have a...
We are very excited about a new feature introduced in Gig Performer 1.5. It's something we've wanted from the very beginning and it's something that we believe many people will really find incredibly useful. Normally, Gig Performer preloads all rackspaces, which means that all plugins that will...
If you are unable to get Gig Performer widgets to learn Omnisphere parameters, it is probably the case that Host Automation is not enabled in Omnisphere. Please click on this support page at Spectrasonics for instructions on how to enable Host Automation in Omnisphere. Once you have...
A lot of people asked about controlling multiple parameters from a single knob or slider and wondered why we didn't have such a facility in our first release. In fact we got quite a bit of criticism for the lack of such a feature. Apart from...
Gig Performer has a sophisticated OSC implementation that can be used for a variety of purposes, one of which is to allow bidirectional control with an iPad running a control surface such as Lemur or TouchOSC (Using Touch OSC with Gig Performer). To help you get...
Gig Performer allows you to create multiple "gigs" at the same time and they are completely independent of each other, each one separately controllable. We had a couple of scenarios in mind for this feature such as allowing vocals to use an independently controllable (and...
There are various plugins and third party applications that we feel would be particularly beneficial to users of Gig Performer. We will occasionally write a blog article about such things once we have personal experience of them. However, we want our users to understand that if we...
Both bands (http://securityproject.band and http://beyondthewall.band) with whom I play use a monitoring system where everyone gets their own personal mix. If you're using an in-ear system, this approach is terrific. You can tweak your mix to hear exactly what you need without any leakage. Most...
Yeah, we know, you've spent months or even years creating your set list, tweaking your plugins, changing them, getting your sound just right. Now you've got hundreds of patches and the notion of having to start all over again seems really painful. But here's a...
The Midi In Omni plugin is very convenient as it doesn't care from where your MIDI is coming, it will process everything. If you have a single keyboard (or perhaps just a single MIDI pedalboard if you're a guitarist) then the Midi in Omni is...
Every audio application that has a CPU meter shows the audio CPU usage rather than the overall application usage, as do plugins that have CPU activity monitoring. Some applications, even when they are at rest, i.e, when no audio is playing, will use significant CPU cycles....
NB: This problem is fixed in version 1.0.4 If you assign an OSC handle to a name, change it and THEN change a parameter, Gig Performer will crash. The workaround is to save the gig after you change the name and then reloading it....
Note: This issue is fixed as of version 1.0.4. Every time you start Gig Performer, by default it does a quick check to see if there are any new plugins. If Gig Performer tells you every time you start that it is testing a plugin that was tested last...
We can't answer that for you - everyone has different needs. But KVR has a nice list of plugins ranked by popularity so check through their list. You never know what you'll find....
Plugins have to be validated before they are used by plugin hosts. This is normally done automatically by Gig Performer when it starts up and detects a new plugin. Sometimes a particular plugin may take longer than expected, perhaps because it's trying to connect to a...
NB - this problem is fixed as of version 1.0.3. If you don't have an audio interface connected and powered up, Gig Performer will crash at start up. Our fault, it never occurred to us that anyone would run Gig Performer without an audio interface 😂 Seriously...
Turns out it's not! What has happened is that Crystal defines about 768 parameters but only a few of them are actually used. The rest are simply unnamed, so have empty strings. Since Gig Performer only has a small area where plugin parameters are displayed (because...
Update: If you have upgraded to Catalina (OS X 10.15) you will not be able to load 32-bit plugins at all. Don’t even bother trying! ----------------- First of all, the bad news is that you can't do it directly. Gig Performer is a 64-bit application and so...
Gig Performer is of course intended for live performance but suppose you just want to capture what you're playing, processed through all the plugins you want to use such as Guitar Rig or S-Gear along with your favorite phaser, compressor and so forth? You can...
As a performing musician touring with several bands including The Security Project and Beyond The Wall, there are certain plugins I can't do without on tour and I thought I'd mention some of them here in case anyone is interested. Note that I have no relationship...
Unlike some applications where you have a single place to associate certain widgets with physical knobs and sliders, each rackspace can have individual associations. This means that in one rackspace your expression pedal might control the volume of some instrument and in another rackspace that...
Gig Performer has a built-in system that detects crashes and (with your permission) can send us that information so that we can fix the problem. In the event that this dialog shows up, we would appreciate it if you would fill in the information and...
I received an interesting email from Jim Meyer, a Chapman Stick player in Vancouver who is using Gig Performer. His setup is intriguing so with his permission, I'm reposting the email he sent me. So, here’s the fun I’ve been having with Gig Performer: I have a Chapman...
For Gig Performer 3 (or newer) versions, please refer to this updated KB article for information about using ASIO4ALL Deprecated: Some users have reported that Gig Performer for Windows crashes with older versions of the ASIO drivers. Please make sure you update your drivers. You can also install the latest...
The Security Project is a prog rock band that performs the early progressive repertoire of Peter Gabriel. I've been performing with them for about 4 years now, going on a couple of tours per year. My main software system was a custom developed application using...