I played a live gig with GS3

[JonFairhurst]

Yep. Played GS3 live. It was rock solid, and sounded GREAT.

It was no big show, just a jam session at a friend's house, but I went with 100% Giga from my keyboard.

I set up various patches with split keyboards and Larry Seyer's Big and Beefy Acoustic Drums, SI's Fender P-Bass and the Vintaudio C7. I only wish I had more arms.

For portability I was playing through 200W into a single EV 12" speaker. The drums and bass sounded really punchy and clean. The piano sounded okay, but is much better on my full range stereo system.

Everything went great. I'll do this again. The only difficulties were that I plugged my Midisport into a different USB connector and it took a minute to sort that out, and I had to set my keyboard not to send patch changes when I selected the different setups. I ran with no mixer, so I had to be careful not to do anything to max the volume and send a 200W square wave into the speaker. I was careful, and the cone is still in the basket.

GS3.04 has been totally solid for me. I'll do this again, only I'll come prepared with some sequences, so I can just play piano and let the PC play drums and bass. Some songs (covers) have horn parts, so I can add those too.

The operation was a success. :)

-JF

[DPDAN]

That's cool Jon! I laughed when you said the cone was still in the basket :D

DPDAN

[digitalson]

how was the latency? did you load all the sounds in memory or load as you go?

[GTBannah]

The operation was a success. :)

-JF


.... and the patient didn't die .... :)

[JonFairhurst]

how was the latency? did you load all the sounds in memory or load as you go?

The latency was excellent. My playing was so-so. :)

Given that I was just doing piano, bass and drums in various combinations, I pre-loaded everything. I set my controller to work with up to three layers with keyboard splits and overlays. I had the faders mapped to the channel volumes so I could mix the three channels from the keyboard.

I found that it was best not to send program/bank changes when I switched keyboard patches. I kept piano on channel 1 (ports 1 and 2 linked, GigaPulse on Aux 1 & 2, which is the Vintaudio way of working), drums on channel 2 with stacked GigaPulse in the channel, and bass on ch3 with no GigaPulse.

If you do program changes, the GigaPulse routing no longer makes sense, and the mix volume gets weird. There are other ways to set things up, but pre-loading and avoiding channel changes was best for a quick, simple setup.

-JF

[tombo]

I use Giga 3 in a live rig all the time. For the most part, it works great. I have had a Conexant Wave Stream error pop up a few times, but never during a performance. It hasn't happened in quite a while, either.

I use FX-Max's GVA in Brainspawn forte, along with several other softsynths. I also use Midi Maestro which is a midi sequencer designed for live performance. It drives forte's synths as well as giga.

I know it sounds like a crash waiting to happen, but it is all very solid at 2.9ms latency. This is using a Athlon64 3200+ system with 2Gig of memory. I have even overclocked the FSB to 215 MHz and it still works great. I just need to make sure I don't push the CPU too close to 100%, but that's always true.

Tom Boughner
PraySong Music

[JonFairhurst]

Hi Tom,

I'll have to look into Midi Maestro. Sonar is definitely NOT designed for live. (To be honest, after working with Vegas 5's perfect transport control scheme and then going back to Sonar, sometimes I even wonder if it was even designed for studio use. ;)).

I'm really looking forward to sequencing drums and bass for our little jam band. A live-oriented sequencer is just what I need.

-JF

[Prosilicium]

From 2 years I play in live mode before gs 2.54 and now Gs3 , Black grand 24bits !and strings , sax or brass together .

Now I use P4 3,4Ghz and 2G ram , master Keyboard S90 Yamaha , Terratec phase 22 ( and clean window xp :o )

Never have crash during 5 hours of performance ,no latency , very perfect

But at this time , I cannot use Gigapulse and no more 2 effects (one echo and one reverb nfx use in return), if more latency go up , and poly down !

I think the next generation of processor will resolve this problem :cool: