Drones and Latch Sustain in MainStage

A frequent question I get is how to latch notes in order to create a sustained drone. Drones are used as a bed to play over top of in a song and they are used for song transitions. There are several ways you can accomplish this in your MainStage concerts that I will describe.

Map a button to turn sustain on and off

This advantage of this method is that it can be implemented relatively easily. The disadvantage of this method of this method is that is I think it is the most complicated to execute in a live setting. However, I used this method effectively before I learned to write midi scripts. Here is how you do it.

First, Drop a button in your template and map it to the button on your keyboard you want to use to turn latch on and off. Make sure the button behavior is set to “alternating value”.

Then you can do one of two things. The first is that you can set it at the concert level to always be latch sustain like this. Notice it becomes associated with the sustain for a particular keyboard.

Or you can map it to sustain to a specific channel strip. I do this often when I want to have a drone playing from one patch but I don’t want the sustain to effect the other channel strips.

When you play live, you turn the button on to activate sustain and then play the notes that you want. When you’re ready to turn off the drone, hit your button again to turn off sustain. If you want to change the notes that are sustaining then you’ll need to turn the button off, turn it back on, and play your new notes.

Use a MIDI Script

Scripter is a one of the midi plugins built into MainStage. It has the ability to modify any incoming midi data and can generate its own midi data. It is quite flexible. It’s disadvantage is that using it requires at least some basic programing knowledge to create your own scripts. Fortunately, there are several scripts already created that you can use. Each one is made a little different

Drone Tools

cost: $15

You can find it at That Worship Sound.

The Drone

cost: $9

You can find it here.

Console Drone

cost: free

This is a script that I wrote. You can find it here.