Getting started with Gig Performer Essentials

Jul 15, 2025 | Gig Performer Blog

If you have started your free trial of Gig Performer Essentials or you have just purchased it, this blog article is intended to provide you with various resources for getting started with Gig Performer Essentials as easily as possible.

Thank you for your interest in Gig Performer®, our premium audio plugin host for live performance and session musicians, created by musicians for musicians. Apart from creating an outstanding software application for live performance that lets you be the Artist, we recognize the value of supporting you along your journey to master Gig Performer and truly Own The Stage®.

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User Guide

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The very first resource with which to get started is the Getting Started section of our user guide. Here you can find basic setups for keyboardists, guitarists, vocalists, drummers, other musicians and FOH engineers. The user guide is always up-to-date. Make sure to check out the latest features and changes in Gig Performer updates and upgrades.

Note: our user guide covers all Gig Performer features. We made clear notes if a feature is not available in the Essentials version of Gig Performer.
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Built-in templates

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We’ll also highlight the Built-in templates chapter that explains templates, fully functional gig files so you can immediately start tweaking sounds and experiment with your setup.

Gig Performer Essentials built-in templates, Setlist tab

 

We recommend that you review this live stream to learn how you can optimize your workflow using bundled templates. If you are a guitarist, this YouTube video with Igor Paspalj, the Guitar World’s 2020 Electric Guitarist of The Year, shows how to use and improve guitar templates.
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Community forum

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The heart of all Gig Performer user interaction is through the Community forums. This is the place where musicians can discuss their use cases, issues, explore new opportunities to use Gig Performer and many other topics. There is a great atmosphere in the Community and we’re proud to have such knowledgeable and kind members as part of our virtual family. Many Gig Performer users have explicitly commented on the value of the support our Community offers, such as in this thread:

That did it! Brilliant! Thanks everyone for your support. This community is 100% of the reason why I bought Gig Performer and why I will stick with it until the end. Truly invaluable.

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All Gig Performer resources at once place

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We’ve compiled a list of all Gig Performer resources and how-to threads (now over than 150 useful guides) in this thread.

How-to topics range from beginner to advanced and you can find relevant blog articles, YouTube videos, user manual pages, live streams, etc.

Here are the most important articles to get up to speed:

Note: some of the tutorials may use features that are not available in Gig Performer Essentials.
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Video tutorials

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As for the Gig Performer YouTube channel, to help you get started, make sure to check out our Foundations and Build it with Gig Performer series:

Foundation series:

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Build it with Gig Performer:

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Two other interesting videos are The First 10 Minutes In Gig Performer For Guitarists with Igor Paspalj and The First 10 Minutes In Gig Performer For Keyboardists. Make sure to check out other playlists, videos and live streams where we interviewed many gigging musicians such as Andy Burton and Joel Brazy.
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Blog articles

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If you prefer written tutorials, there are numerous blog articles that address specific features and aspects of Gig Performer. We’ll highlight the blog How to change sounds and control plugins from your MIDI controller:

Use Behringer FCB1010 footswitches to activate Gig Performer Rackspaces

and How to create keyboard and velocity splits. (You can find these blog articles and many other how to tutorials in the Resources thread, already mentioned above).
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Gig Performer in Action

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If you are wondering how other artists are using Gig Performer and with what gear, make sure to check our Gig Performer in Action page. You can see many names such as Blue Weaver (Bee Gees), Chris Broderick (In Flames, Megadeth), Igor Paspalj (Electric Guitarist of the World 2020), Robert Martin (Frank Zappa), Trey Gun (King Crimson), … … … even special projects such as PianoArc.

Gig Performer and PianoArc, Circle keyboard

One of our users independently tested Gig Performer’s latency and jitter. The results are remarkable – click here to learn more. That’s also why Gig Performer is used in other markets such as broadcasting and live streaming. Click on this interesting article to learn more.

Note: Gig Performer videos are recorded in English. However, you can find many YouTube videos of Gig Performer in other languages made by Gig Performer enthusiasts. For example, Marcelo Gesualdi created many great Gig Performer tutorials in Portuguese (click here to check them out). Click here to find resources in German. For resources in Portuguese, click here.

To see what’s new in the Gig Performer world, check out our newsletter. We keep an archive of all released newsletters here.

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Own The Stage® with Gig Performer®

Nemanja Pudar

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Related topics:
Why use a computer with Gig Performer rather than hardware?
How music software has failed live performers and why Gig Performer is the solution?