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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! The Addams Family Keyboard 2 Overture Pn MainStage is a piece of software that turns your computer into a musical instrument for live performance. As you play a physical MIDI device connected to your computer, MainStage can produce an endless variety of different sounds and effects. Because of its versatility, accessibility, and stability, MainStage is the most common platform for musical theatre keyboard programming all over the world. MainStage can be purchased from the Apple App Store.

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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.
If this is your first time using MainStage, we encourage you to spend some time familiarizing yourself with it before your rental. It is an extremely powerful tool and may seem a little overwhelming at first, but it is conceptually simple.

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