Mainstage Experiments Part 2

Original Demo Followup

I have loaded another Shimmer Piano Demo and at about 1:30 into it I adjust the sends to the second Shimmer to give you a sense of what would happen if I were aggressive on the send knob position! Enjoy and I welcome feedback - positive and negative.

Sound Design and Processing

To follow up on my last post, I wanted to talk about my process and how it evolved while building my experiment.

Let's just walk through my construction process first.

I selected my sounds to begin. First I added a Steinway 2 Piano patch from the EXS library in Mainstage. 

Then I loaded a pad in Retrosynth that was close to what I wanted. Then I tweaked the pad sound to get the rich fat subtle sound I was looking for.

Then I routed the two instrument outputs into a single bus and applied some minor top end eq and some compression.

On that "sum" channel, I pointed the aux sends to a channel that  I set up to hold my effects stack. I created a second channel with another effects stack to route signal through as well. Above, labeled Shimmer 1 and Shimmer 2.

I created all of the effects patches and stacked them and tweaked until I came out with a really cool sounding piano sound that "shimmered". It is a matter of trial and error and some knowledge about how each effect would interact and compliment each in the line of effects. In this case, I have a really long "SilverVerb" reverb into a delay, into a pitch shifter dialed up or down a whole octave (12 semi-tones), Then into another SilverVerb with a long trail and size. 

I then bus some of that via Aux into the next channel of a very similar set of effects. This is so I can control the amount of effects and have lots of options for my sound depending on what the song calls for.

This technique is not new and is very similar to others out there... but it is my simple twist on some of these methods to give me a lot of options.

I will put this patch up in this post so you can pull it down and tinker with it. IT is assumed that you have Mainstage and the synths used in this patch.

There are 3 patches in this concert that you can flip between. These are variations on my original patch. I am building a complete set of patches for a performance library that will be for purchase soon.

These are the original drawing board I started with.

Enjoy and leave comments on tweaks you make and areas where you think they can be improved.
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silver_platter_keys.zip
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File Type:	zip

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