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Hoots : Using 3 or more keyboards in Mainstage 3 I'm trying to use Mainstage to create a MIDI-based band at the school that I teach at. I've connected 3 keyboards and assigned them to different patches. Two of the keyboards are the - freshhoot.com

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Using 3 or more keyboards in Mainstage 3
I'm trying to use Mainstage to create a MIDI-based band at the school that I teach at. I've connected 3 keyboards and assigned them to different patches. Two of the keyboards are the exact same brand and type (M-Audio Keyrig 49). The issue that I'm having is that the keyboards that are the same cannot be mapped to different patches; they play both of them. I tried changing the MIDI channel and that didn't solve anything. Any ideas how I can distinguish between two M-Audio keyboards?


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It seems so easy once you know how to do it. I actually couldn't figure it out and had to use my web search skills. A guy named Eric Barfield has a tutorial here:
ericwbarfield.com/blog/2014/4/25/tuuca6bxj8hc0r3428m9x8mx07n8rl
What you've already done is gone to the Layout tab, added on-screen keyboards, clicked on them and then selected a separate MIDI port for each one of them.

You would think the next step would be to map an instrument to a keyboard, but no, you go back to Edit view and map instruments to MIDI ports in the channel inspector for the instrument:

Click the instrument channel strip. Under midi input, select keyboard: YOUR KEYBOARD NAME. Do the same with the other keyboard.

If you have three physical keyboards and three different instruments, then you can just select a different MIDI port for each instrument and then each keyboard controls a single instrument.

If you want to play more than one instrument with a single physical keyboard, then first make sure you have an on-screen keyboard mapped to the MIDI port. Then go to two or more instruments and set them both or all to the same MIDI port. Now when you play that keyboard, it will play all of the instruments that have that MIDI port selected. Then you can go to Layer Editor, which is on the Edit screen, click a track and the Layer Editor for the keyboard that the track is mapped to will be an option at the bottom. In the layer editor you can choose key ranges for each instrument by clicking and dragging.

Whew. Probably a little more complicated than it has to be, but that's Apple Professional Creative software for you.


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