Mainstage Mondays: Loop Community's Sound Park and Mainstage Patch Bundles

Note: this is a blog a wrote for loopcommunity.com's blog. I really believe in what this company is doing for worship arts, and it's definitely worth the visit.

You can read the whole blog with more hotlinks here.

You’re a busy worship leader at a growing church with a bunch of volunteer musicians every weekend. Everyone’s been practicing hard on the songs all week, but when you get onstage, something just doesn’t sound right.

It’s the keyboardist again. She’s playing the right notes, but she just isn’t able to get the right sounds out of that older keyboard. Even if there was money in the budget to buy a new keyboard, it would take hours of time each week and advanced technical knowledge to get the presets to sound like the original recordings. What’s the solution?

Fortunately, there’s an incredibly easy, inexpensive way to get around this problem every week- SoundPark + Mainstage 3.

Mainstage 3

Apple just released an amazing new version of their popular live performance software, Mainstage 3, just a few months ago. It’s completely re-inventing the way keyboardists play their music live.

Mainstage 3 acts as a main keyboard (it generates all of the sounds that a normal keyboard would), but is triggered using a midi controller hooked into the Mac computer running the software.

Mainstage is so much more than just a keyboard- it has studio-quality effects and sample libraries that far out-perform any hardware synth on the market today. The sounds are all directly taken from Apple’s DAW Logic Pro X, and they can be designed to sound exactly like any keyboard sound you’ll hear on a praise album.

Setup is super-simple. All you need is a Mac computer and an inexpensive midi controller (you can often use the midi-capable keyboard you already own using a usb to midi interface) and you’re good to go. And with Mainstage 3 costing a ridiculously low $29.99, you can afford to buy a copy for every keyboard player on your team, allowing them to practice, tweak, and perform with Mainstage 3 on their own laptop.

SoundPark

Mainstage 3 is a wonderful tool for live performance, but by itself there’s still the problem of getting the sounds in Mainstage 3 to sound exactly like the original recording. Enter SoundPark.

SoundPark is the best place on the internet to find custom worship presets that you can instantly load into a variety of music software programs, including Mainstage 3. Want to find that pulsing synth intro on “Strength Will Rise”? With one click, you’ve got it. Need that mellotron-ish strings and piano for “Give Me Your Eyes”? It’s as simple as searching SoundPark’s database of patches.

Once you’ve downloaded the sound you like for Mainstage 3, it’s as simple as dragging it into your Mainstage project. All of the sounds, notes, arpeggiators, and effects will automatically load into your project, ready for next time you take the stage.

SoundPark offers most of the presets for 99 cents each, with some presets available for free. There’s no restrictions on these patches, either- you can share them with your entire team and modify them all you want.

Get Started Today

To get you started using SoundPark for your live keyboard rig, check out our Mainstage 3 worship bundles. You’ll get 20 custom-designed, exactly-like-the-recording presets, or an additional 10 electric-mechanical patches (pianos, electric pianos, and organs).

Worship Presets (20 Pack) Volume 1 and 2

MainStage Electro-Mechanical Presets

Songs Included in Preset Bundles:

Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) Come, Now Is The Time to Worship From The Inside Out Glory To God Forever God Of Wonders Happy Day Healer Holy Is The Lord Hosanna How He Loves Jesus Messiah Mighty to Save Open The Eyes Of My Heart Our God Revelation Song Shout To The Lord The Heart Of Worship We Fall Down Your Grace Is Enough You Never Let Go