Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Session Ep11 – Gig Performer on Surface Book”.
Hello, i’m robert vincent and welcome to this surface session today. I just wanted to take a quick look and a new piece of software. I’Ve been playing with it’s called gig performer from from desk, u technologies and what it is essentially is a is a VST plugin, an instrument host it’ll host, all your virtual instruments and all your plugins and let you chain them together to use in a gig in Live performance, it’s that easy, really there’s a few others of these sorts of things about like countable. Is it cool or brainstorm? Forte of all things? And recently there was a really nice one called freestyle, which was pretty cool, but it struggled a bit in the touch environment now, gig performer does all that kind of stuff, but it’s fabulous in a touch environment, and that’s, of course, is why i’m interested in it. So let’s have a quick look, so this i’ve loaded up a project. I’Ve created my own live performance rig. I’Ve got a keyboard aids which is routed to a couple of cents inside, and I’ve got an external input coming in from here, which is going through a couple of on effects simple, just to show you what the heck is about.
You’Ve got two views in geek, performer you’ve got the rack view and then you’ve got the modular chaining together view. Whatever you want to call it. The idea of this rack view or the rack space as they call it, is that you can create a rack of controls for your virtual instruments so, rather than launching the GUI and having a fiddle in the GUI, which we know can be a bit hit and Miss with touch instead, you create your own controls, just the ones you want to use. So in this case I’ve actually got two instruments load.
You know I’ve got a jupiter-8 and a mini Moog and all I actually want to play with, as ever is the cutoff and resonance. So that’s what I’ve placed here, they’re both praying in unison together, I haven’t done anything clever like layer them or anything which you can absolutely doing this software, but I haven’t had the time so they’re just playing together. If I run an arpeggio through it or something I can then get into here, did you know something quite interesting there? Yes, it’s multi-touch! Yes, it is. I can move all these buggers at the same time, if I so wish, which is brilliant. So whatever you know, crappy non touch of all synth you have, you can create a touchable interface for it.
That’S really really interesting. Now to me the rack space. It doesn’t look awesome, it looks okay, you know and you’ve got all sorts of different choices of knobs and things that you can use and that’s great, it’s just it’s just slightly underwhelming as far as the aesthetic goes, but what you do is you hit this button Here, which is an edit button and then down here on the Left, I’ve got all these different things I can put on now.
So I’m going to bring in a new knob to this place here, let’s get a metal angled knob there for no reason, I’m going to stick that there there beautiful kind of then down the bottom half you select the plug-in that you want that to affect. So, in this case the jupiter-8, then I can select from an enormous list of parameters that it pulls out of the synth or I can hit learn and it will bring up the synth and I can choose a parameter. I want to change so what the heck do I want. I’Ve got that that I’m going to go for nfo move that one can move that one there we go. You see that there’s no moving that in any mode. Of course, I can just move things around and put them where I want them to go turn off that and that so I’m gon na put cut off from resonance.
You know a bit more like that and put this one down here like so, and then I go out of edit mode put my thing back on and now I have control over that whatever that is, that might be good, I’m making this up so already. I think you can see that this is pretty awesome. Let’S have a look at my external input, so I’ve got my another 32 running here now, that’s running through a filter here and also a reverb by man, and of course I can add the other stuff as well. All right sounds awful, but that doesn’t matter the concept.
Is that you’re, putting all these things together, all these effects? You can play your entire eco ever is you want to play? I mean you, don’t have a large controller keyboard. You might have a Cynthia Cynthia, a synth maps here. You can do all of that play and just have your surface book or your service pray for sitting next to you and you can just make quick adjustments as you go on the fly. It’S beautiful! It’S just the sort of thing that we need now: let’s look at the other page, which is the connections view or the modular space, and this is where I set up my since so I’ve got my Jupiter well hey over here. I’Ve got my mini Moog. I’Ve got reactor which is an effect, and I’ve got unfiltered audio indent over here and that’s my regen also. You can make it as complex or as simple as you’d like. So this is showing me all of the inputs from my audio audio interface and all the outputs here.
So I’ve got a single input coming from my Moog in here and that I’m rooting in to stereo input into the filter, then through the effect and then back to the audio out here. I’Ve got the MIDI in from my base station keyboard, which is going to both of these and their outputs are going to the out. I could very easily drop another effect in between or for that matter I could chain these back through here. It doesn’t really care.
I go back to my rack space for a moment, seeing that awesomeness is happening without me having to bring up the GUI for reactor. I can do that. I think like so I mean there is something going on. I mean geek performer.
Rather, this is version one and I would actually probably kind of put it down as a bit of a beta version, because there are things that perhaps I’m not as good as they could be or perfect as it could be or smooth as it could be. For instance, it messes with my scaling now end all of the sins come up tiny, weeny small, so that’s no good. Sometimes a pen works sometimes touch works. It doesn’t always work the same in the same place.
So the way you add something to this system is that you just right-click, don’t see I’m using my pen in this situation and it gives you access to all the things you can add at the moment you can put in some volume controls. There’S no mixer, although they are currently working on that, so you could do little sub mixes of stuff. But I mean one of their ideas is to do away with that complexity and they just want you to route stuff in and out without having to mess around with lots of mixing and busing and aux Inge and all that sort of thing. But if I wanted to add another synth I could just go to here. Let’S add a Fafi, sir again, it’s it’s come in a bit small, but that’s. Okay.
Obviously, there’s no sound at the moment because it’s not wide in here it is here now I can bring in the same MIDI output plug that in and I can take his output directly to here. You you, how would I know well, let’s turn this bit off for the moment, and I can go back to my rack space. I mean that that one this one that one there I could go into edit edit mode. So I mean I have a slight problem here and I can’t seem to work out how to scroll up and down in this particular window without employing a mouse. It just doesn’t doesn’t seem to work. So why bring a mouse in here so gon na work? For me simply and easily: yes, it is there you go, I can we all mouse up and down just about and you’re sticking a new panel, a new one, you panel and give it a groovy color, I’m gon na bring over an old-school knob give it to The far ficer learn: what on earth are we gon na put this to? I don’t have the faintest idea how about tremolo? Let’S do that tremolo, let’s bring in another knob, I’m gon na make that third or anything about the Farfisa.
Well, it just master volume will do you know, and it’s that simple I mean my demo is a bit crap. I appreciate that because I’m not investing in mathematica stride just to demonstrate the potential of it to you and there you go. I mean my experience of it so far is that it takes a bit of work. You know you’ve got to have a bit of a plan, because if you’re setting up a gig there’s a there can be a lot involved in that you want to be layering.
Your keyboards choosing the octave range is you’re going to be using on your keyboard, putting the effects together, what sort of presearch you’re going to be using? What sort of controls you’re gon na want on the front end and all of that takes a little bit of time and thinking about, but ultimately all that time, all that planning all that putting it together is gon na pay enormous dividends, because you’re going to be Able to be at your gig playing and you can be able to touch and move controls really really easy. So you are geek performer they’ve got it kind of on half price at a hundred and twenty nine dollars, or is that pounds I can’t quite remember which to me seems a little bit expensive? I can’t believe they’ll try and sell it for $ 250 pounds whatever it is. That seems extraordinary, but for I reckon a hundred quid hundred dollars that sort of price range for this sort of piece of software. I think what would be ideal would be exactly on the money it’s immensely powerful.
It allows you to connect all your stuff together in a modular way, so you can start chaining up effects. You can start chaining up instruments and the way that it reveals all of the inputs and outputs is brilliant. The way you can chain it together easily with the pen or the touch it’s excellent. It could be a bit more automatic.
I’M sometimes a bit annoyed that this hasn’t automatically routed itself to things, but they say that they want to give you the power and the options to do what you want to do, rather than having to undo things that something does automatically that make sense. So yeah there you go gig performer, a lot of power. A lot of moley touch.
It’S a cool thing we like so until next time go make some tunes. .