Overview
A pro studio that’s not just for pros.
Logic Pro 9
Everything you need to make great music.
Plug-ins & Sounds
An instant, massive collection.
MainStage 2
A complete live rig, right on your Mac.
Soundtrack Pro 3
The perfect bridge to Final Cut Pro.
Production Utilities
Tools to perfect and publish your album.
Love the sound you got on your recording? MainStage 2 makes it easy to bring all the same instruments and effects to the stage. You can even expand your show with live loops or prerecorded backing tracks. With the Mac as the core of your live rig, setup is faster, teardown is faster, and everything in between is more reliable. You can completely customise your layout, from the number, type, size and colour of the controls to the parameters they manipulate. And you can instantly assign onscreen controls to the faders, knobs and switches on your hardware for hands-on control.
Explore MainStage 2
Made for performers.
Knobs, faders and switches you can’t miss.
The MainStage interface is designed especially for live performance. Streamlined 3D graphics give you a high-contrast, full-screen view of your controls, so they stand out from across the stage or through the glare of the floodlights. And you can set things up so each control is linked to a different parameter in each patch. With just the controls you need onscreen for the song, you’ll never have to hunt for the right knob.
Command central.
Now that MainStage features ReWire and MIDI-out support, your Mac brings together everything you use to create all your music, giving you total control. Each patch works as a self-contained audio mixer and router, so you can completely change direction mid-performance. One minute you can be playing some heavily distorted guitar with a full backing band. And the next you can be creating bass loops with an external synth, against an Ultrabeat drum pattern.
Get creative with loop recording.
Loopback is another new plug-in that gives you advanced sound-on-sound recording capabilities. Now guitar players can easily lay down a rhythm part, then solo over it. Feeling adventurous? You can create a complete, spontaneous arrangement on stage. Lay down a beat, layer on a guitar riff, add a synth pad, then tear into a solo. When you’re ready to move on, just hit the foot switch to fade everything out and start building the groove for your next section.
Sound bigger than ever.
With Playback, a brand-new plug-in, your Mac becomes a flexible, reliable backing track player. It’s easy to use, too. Whether you’re rounding out your sound with a simple stereo backing track or a set of separate, mixable stems, all you have to do is step on a foot switch to jump to the next cue, adjust the tempo, arrange on the fly or fade out smoothly.
You’re in control.
MainStage supports your addiction to knobs, dials and faders. It can connect with just about any external MIDI device on the planet. And the interface is simplicity itself. Just map a physical control to an onscreen control and it’s connected forever (or until you change your mind). No more mapping knobs over and over for each patch. And down the road, if your hardware fails when you’re about to go on stage, it’s quick and easy to swap it out.
MainStage 2 also features new pickup modes that make fixed controller knobs behave more like the endless encoder knobs found on high-end gear. If your control surface can receive status information from software, MainStage will now send MIDI messages to keep your control displays in perfect sync.
Mac vs. the machines.
Creating sounds with your Mac is so much simpler than relying on all kinds of external gear. Instead of squinting at tiny hardware displays, you get a bright, full-screen view that makes everything easy to tweak. You can also combine any sounds you like — even software and hardware sounds — in one patch.
When it’s time to put those sounds to work, MainStage gives you way more options. Multimapping allows one knob to control multiple plug-in parameters, so you can dramatically change your sound with the turn of a single knob. The EXS Editor now opens right in MainStage, which makes it easier to edit sampler instruments on the fly. And the Patch List Manager gives you the flexibility to rearrange or skip patches as your set list evolves.
Smarter, faster, more efficient.
MainStage leverages the power and efficiency of the Mac to deliver performance and sound quality that most hardware can’t touch. For example, the EXS sampler can put huge amounts of data to work for a single instrument by using more than the typical 4GB of memory allotted to a single application and tapping into virtual memory. Aliased channel strips lighten the load on your system by reusing the plug-ins you’ve already loaded. MainStage can access the processing power of multiple cores to make sure every note is heard, even when you’re pushing the limits of your system. And if you ever run into a problem, Autosave lets you get back up and performing in no time.
Your music, your layout.
New Grouped Controls let you drag and drop entire sets of knobs, dials, faders, meters and more into your layout. From there, you can easily customise the number, type, size and colour of all your controls. You can even decide what each control does for each patch. Alignment guides snap everything into place. And Lift and Stamp features let you quickly copy characteristics from one layout and apply them to another. You can store your preferences as templates and call them up whenever you need them. You can also put your patches in any order and change them on a whim.
Amazingly simple setup.
With MainStage 2, setting up your stage rig is faster than ever. Start by choosing from a complete range of performance templates, many of them preloaded with great-sounding patches. Or use the new Patch Browser to find just the right screen-controllable patch, ready to be tweaked to perfection.
And if you ever need to perform with a different Mac, you don’t have to rebuild everything. Just save your live set as a project and MainStage puts all the necessary files into a single folder you can take with you anywhere.
Capture your performance.
MainStage 2 lets you record any audio signal passing through. Just route all of your audio to a designated stereo output and choose your file format — standard AIFF, Wave audio, or even Apple CAF for recording performances of almost any length.
No performer left behind.
Guitar players.
MainStage 2 is a huge leap forward for guitar players. It lets you play live with all the great tones from Amp Designer and Pedalboard, along with any of your favourite Audio Unit guitar effects.
Take it to the stage.
Now all your favourite instruments and effects can go everywhere you go.
See Amp Designer, Pedalboard, Loopback and Playback in action
You also get a full-screen tuner, foot-controlled tap tempo, and 3D models that change with each patch to represent the different Pedalboard stompboxes you’re using. Seamless patch switching lets notes and chords trail off naturally when you switch patches. And MainStage 2 adds support for the new Apogee GiO USB audio interface and control device, which lets you operate Pedalboard, Wah and rotary speaker effects, and the Loopback and Playback plug-ins hands-free.
Keyboardists.
Your dream gig awaits. MainStage 2 is not only an amazing host for software instruments and effects, it’s also packed with innovations that let you sail through your stage performance. For starters, there’s the Floating Split Point. It intelligently moves the split point on a split keyboard patch to respond to what you’re playing. Start walking a bass line up the keyboard, and the split point moves up so the bass doesn’t suddenly become some other sound when you get into the higher notes.
With Multimapping, you can assign multiple parameters to a single control, so you can smoothly manipulate your sound without trying to turn several knobs at once. And seamless patch switching lets you hold a chord in one sound while moving to a whole new patch.
Solo artists.
Loopback and Playback, two of the most exciting new features of MainStage, completely change what a single musician can bring to the stage. You’ve got a backing track player that lets you support your performance with anything from a single stereo track to a full set of independent, mixable stems. And with deep live looping capabilities, you can build and manipulate a spontaneous arrangement right in front of your audience.
Drummers.
MainStage makes it easy to expand beyond your acoustic kit with an enormous library for the EXS sampler and more than 50 drum kits, 400 sequence patterns and 1000 sounds from Ultrabeat. You can also build drum and loop kits from the 40 instrument plug-ins that come with Logic Studio or your own third-party plug-ins, such as Stylus RMX or BFD. External MIDI support lets you work in sounds from your favourite old-school hardware and control it all from MainStage.
