Apple flew from Cupertino to Brooklyn (my hometown!) to take over the entire block surrounding BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for the introduction of some new Macs and iPad Pros. Best video streaming software for mac. The new Macs, in particular, were long-awaited — the Mac lineup, taken in sum total and aside from the MacBook Pro, has gone longer than it ever has before without updates.
Runner-Up, Best Overall: Apple Mac mini at Apple, “A sophisticated and compact desktop-class computer.' Best Budget: Lenovo IdeaCentre 310S at Best Buy, 'The 500GB of hard drive storage has more than enough space for pictures, videos, and applications.”.
Mac Book Pro or Mini for MainStage 3 Having struggled with MainStage 3 on the MBA I've had general advice from Apple customer service recommending an upgrade. I want something transportable and robust enough to survive the stage. Mainstage free download - Core Training for MainStage 3, FastTrack For Auto Sampling with MainStage for Windows 10, and many more programs. Best Video Software for the Mac How To Run MacOS High. A review of the 2018 Mac mini from the perspective of an electronic music designer and musician for Broadway shows and other live theatrical productions. Many live music acts are now using Apple Mainstage running on a Mac-Mini, and there is a need for a small video monitor / keyboard solution for the Mac -Mini. Looking forward to yoru progress with this.
First up was an entirely new MacBook Air model, redesigned from the ground up. https://sitecoach370.weebly.com/blog/best-color-calibrators-for-mac-screens. The new MacBook Air finally gets a Retina screen; it’s the same 13.3-inch size as before, but with dramatically smaller bezels. The computer retains its wedge shape, tapering off as you go from the hinge to the bottom edge past the trackpad, and the enclosure is fabricated with a new alloy and 100 percent recycled aluminum. It now weighs a bit less, at 2.75 pounds (down from 2.9 or 3 pounds, depending on prior configuration). The Air gets Apple’s quieter third-generation butterfly keyboard. The jury is still out as to whether the tiny rubber surrounds under each key will solve the dust-failure issue, but at least it’s a little better to type on. There’s no Touch Bar (which is little surprise, given that the lower-end 13-inch MacBook Pros don’t have it either.)
Under the hood are 8th Gen Intel CPUs and graphics, up to 16GB RAM, and up to 1.5TB of flash storage. The new model gets 12 hours of web browsing or 13 hours of video playback on a charge. The trackpad gets Force Touch, stereo speakers that are 25 percent louder than before, an array of 3 microphones, and two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports that also support a 5K external display, but no SD card slot anymore as expected (however disappointing). There’s also improved onboard security thanks to the embedded T2 chip, including automatic AES-256 data encryption and a secure boot process.
The new Air starts at $1,199 with 8GB RAM and a Core i5 — $200 more than before, which is seriously unfortunate, although it’s also got some good upgrades — and will be available starting Nov. 7. The $999 Air from before sticks around once again.
Next up is the new Mac mini. It finally gets a quad-core CPU again, this time as standard. It’s been missing, and sorely missed, since 2014 when Apple made all Mac minis dual-core only. That said, the base CPU is just a 3.6GHz quad-core Core i3. The Mac mini’s all-flash storage for the first time as well. Around back are four Thunderbolt 3 ports, 2 USB-A ports (!), HDMI, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
The Mac mini starts at $799 — $300 more than before, but with 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD, and a 3.6GHz quad-core Core i3 standard, and it’s available today. A six-core CPU is also available, and you can pack a Mac mini with 64GB RAM and 2TB storage if you’re made of money. Apple is also playing up the Mac Mini’s potential for build and render farms, software development, live music performances with MainStage 3, and powering digital art and signage installations, all of which are refreshingly pro-level applications for this machine once more.
Finally, the iPad Pro also got refreshed. It’s now available in 11-inch (instead of 10.5) and 12.9-inch varieties and is even thinner than before. The new models support Face ID, lack home buttons, and have smaller bezels, all as rumors had predicted, plus a new magnetic charging setup for the Apple Pencil. Inside is Apple’s 7nm A12X Bionic CPU, with 10 billion transistors, an eight-core CPU, and a seven-core GPU that we’re going to have to find out more about. Perhaps the biggest change here is a move to USB-C, which is especially interesting considering the latest iPhones announced last month stuck with Lightning. You can use the USB-C port to connect an external monitor or charge your iPhone. There’s also a redesigned, two-position Smart Keyboard Folio that works with the new iPad Pro.
The 11-inch model is $799, and the 12-inch model is $999, both with 64GB of storage. You can now even put 1TB of storage in one if you are one of those made-of-money people. These will also be available starting Nov. 7, and the older 10.5-inch model will stick around as well as the excellent-value base model (still the best choice for most people) at $329.
Conspicuously missing from the event were new iMacs. The current 2015-era models still soldier on, inexplicably with 8GB and hard drives as standard. The least expensive iMac with a quad-core CPU, 16GB RAM, and a 256SSD, all table stakes for audio and video production work, costs $1,700, and it’s all outdated hardware. And I’ve yet to meet another creative professional that can afford the base $5,000 iMac Pro, the only semi-recent, high-powered Mac desktop introduction, on top of all their other equipment needs. The new Mac mini helps here, at least.
Now read: Will Phones Soon Finish Off the Camera Market?, Apple Denies Bloomberg Chinese Hacking Story to Congress, and Analyst: Apple Will Switch Away From Intel in 2020
Apple's MainStage is used for many live performances, tours, and even for big Broadway productions! Whatever the scale of your performance, Matt Vanacoro shows you how to keep it running smoothly.
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Apple’s MainStage has quickly become the de facto standard for hosting virtual instruments on Mac platforms. You’d be hard pressed to find a Broadway musical these days that doesn’t trigger sounds for the keyboard players using MainStage. You’ll also find MainStage in the backline setup of a multitude of tours, driving both keyboard and guitar setups. Configuring your MainStage concert files takes some time, and setting things up so that your show runs efficiently and in a stable manner is key for having a successful MainStage experience.
Concerts, Sets, and Patches
Understanding the concert, set, and patch paradigm is key to harnessing the power of MainStage. There is a hierarchy that exists to allow you to have consistency across your sounds, and allow for diversity within patches at the same time. Essentially, anything you create and set at a higher level overrides whatever you set at a lower level. Select the entire concert in the browser, then create a reverb channel, that reverb is now available for every single patch in the entire concert. If you select a patch, however, and add a channel, then whatever you created is only available for that patch.
This is incredibly helpful if you want to create global adjustments. I’ll often put some EQ controls at the top level. If I determine at sound check that the venue isn’t being kind to a certain frequency, I don’t have to go into each individual patch to make adjustments. I can simply tweak the sound at the concert level and the adjustments apply across all of my patches.
Optimize FX
If you’re going to be playing a show with a lot of patch changes and sound settings, you’re going to want to optimize your effect usage. It’s important to take a look and make sure you don’t have effects activated at the concert level that you aren’t using—it would be a big waste of CPU power!
Now would also be a great time to see if you can optimize and make the best use of your bus effects. Making an effort to create shared bus effects rather than each individual patch having its own reverb, for example, can lead to a more efficient and stable concert on the whole. You’ll also generally have a more cohesive sound as you switch patches if they are sharing a reverb bus. (There are always exceptions to this, but it’s a good general rule of thumb)
![]() Make an Alias
Using aliases is one of the most powerful features of MainStage, and it also helps to make your computer better mimic the behavior of a patch/combi setup of a keyboard workstation. Basically, you can use aliases to create ‘pointers’ that direct MainStage to utilize a previously created patch or channel strip.
Best vpn service for mac. At the channel strip level, this can be helpful to utilize a common sound throughout various combinations and layers. Let’s say you’ve created a concert that has a piano sound, then you also make a bunch of patches that have layers on top of it—piano and strings, piano and organ, piano and choir, etc. Now imagine you’re at the gig, and you decide the piano you chose is far too bright for the venue you’re in. You’ll have to go back into every patch and change the piano sound for all of them.
You don’t have to worry about this if you’re using aliases. By creating your first piano sound, then copying it and pasting it into every other utilized sound as an alias, your new patches are all simply pointing to the piano sound instead of creating their own new piano sound. Adjust the original piano sound, and all of the aliases follow suit. It’s really cool! https://sitecoach370.weebly.com/blog/best-music-video-editing-software-for-mac.
To create an alias, simply copy something, then go to the ‘edit’ menu and select ‘paste as alias’. You can do this with an entire patch, or you can do this with individual elements within a patch like a channel strip.
Audit Your Routing
One of the coolest things about MainStage is the ability to have just about anything on your physical keyboard control any element of your sounds and plugins. Routing is a pretty simple process, as you can use MainStage to ‘learn’ what to do with each physical control on your keyboard. MainStage does, however, often have a bunch of default routing options enabled—and don’t forget that many plugins simply respond to MIDI channels on their own, no help from MainStage required!
With all of this in mind, one of the things I often do after creating a MainStage concert is to take a ‘top down’ look at my routing. Open up the ‘assignments and mappings’ window and take a good look at what is controlling what. You may want to delete the ‘unassigned’ item which is routed to ‘all channel strips’. This basically tells MainStage, ‘do NOT route things by default without asking me’, and can save you from headaches when you accidentally touch a control on your keyboard and sound suddenly disappears.
Adjust Your Layout Carefully
Smart controls are super fun, and if you’re in a synth-based band and need to see the resonance and cutoff knobs on the screen they can be extremely helpful. If you’re in a broadway pit, however, you don’t really need to see that stuff. After all, tweaking sounds in the middle of a performance isn’t really something that you’re likely doing. It might make more sense to make better use of your screen real estate with some notes!
I’ll often make notes about where a keyboard split is, where the next cue is coming from, the sky’s the limit! Notes can also help if you have a sub playing your part, you can make some helpful notes to keep everyone ‘on track’. I’ve even thrown lyrics in there in a pinch!
That’s Not All!
Keyboard programming is a true art, and MainStage design is no exception. One of the best things about the program is its flexibility, and there’s no hard and fast rule about sound design. Everyone has their little shortcuts and tricks, and the only ‘wrong’ way to design sounds is to design them so that they crash your concert. Road test your rig, push it to the max before you perform, and have fun!
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