Introduction
Keyboards have been an essential element in musical theatre orchestration for several decades, and keyboard programming has become increasingly sophisticated as the technology for it has developed. Keyboards are sometimes intended to make a small pit orchestra sound larger (e.g., doubling the string parts), or to recreate sounds that aren’t otherwise in the live orchestra (e.g., bagpipes, dulcimer, theremin, harp glisses). Of course, keyboards play keyboard sounds, too — pianos, synthesizers, and organs!
Basic concepts
A MainStage file is called a concert. A concert consists of a sequential list of patches. A patch might consist of a single instrument, or it might have half a dozen instruments. These instruments can be layered, assigned to a specific range of the keyboard, programmed to play in different octaves, or mapped to different notes entirely. A patch can also include sound effects and triggered harp glissandos. These instruments and elements in a patch are represented as channel strips, which visually resemble faders on a mixing console. As you play, you will advance from one patch to the next. Simple keyboard programming might involve only a handful of patches, but it is more common for a show to have hundreds of patches. Individual patches are grouped into sets. In our programming, every song or music cue is added to the concert as a set.In Perform mode, you can quickly navigate between sets using your computer’s left and right arrow keys, and through patches using the up and down arrow keys.