Jørgen Munkeby shows his live rig for Emperor keyboards 

Thanks a lot!

My pleasure! Glad you like it!

Glad you liked the demonstration video! And yeah, this could easily have been an hour long, but I tried to get the essential in. I haven't checked but I wouldn't be surprised if MainStage is for Mac only. MainStage is pretty cheap, though, so you could consider buying a MacBook Pro only for live keyboard use. Anyway, lots of people use Ableton for this too. But I find that having one patch for every part, which can be 10-15 per song, is a bit tedious with Ableton. It's probably easier using Ableton with fewer patches.

Awesome! Thanks for coming to see the full video!

@@ShiningNorway nice tips also for my personal project with a lot of keyboards in the vein of 90's Norwegian Black Metal (Emperor, Satyricon, Kvist, Dimmu Borgir...) 🤘🏻

That's where sample libraries and your own samples work great! You can use the older sounds if you want to.

@@ShiningNorway yes I have a Korg DM 50 and an expander from Roland, the same Ihsahn used on Anthems (searching on internet and pick up by second hand, really great expander/sound and use my Korg like midi controller)

You can easily sample that so you can use those sounds without bringing the whole thing with you.

Glad you like it, buddy!

Also the sounds you've cooked are very good for the old school black metal vibe!

That's an interesting question! With Shining we're doing more soft synths, which is heavier on CPU than on RAM. But with Emperor it's more sampled instruments, which taxes the RAM more than the CPU. So the RAM is really what I need to pay attention to the most. I have one patch per part in a song, and the patches are grouped into song groups which can be moved around when the set list changes. I am only skipping forward, which means that if the same patch is used for three choruses in the same song, then I have three instances of that patch in my concert project. This could easily lead to the RAM getting bogged down if the computer had to load the same sample library multiple times. So I'm overcoming this problem by using what MainStage is calling "alias" patch. This is basically a patch where it's only referencing another patch, and doesn't load the samples twice into memory. The CPU is not a big problem, since it's really only calculating running audio for the current active patch, plus a set amount of time for the previous patch, to keep release tails, delays and reverbs etc. I set that to 5 seconds, but the user can decide. There are sometimes super short dropouts when switching patches, but they're less than 100 ms, so I don't count it as a problem

Thanks a lot! Glad you like the sounds I've cooked up! I've spent some time making them, and trying to make them as efficient as possible using relatively few plugins, but still enough for them to sound cool. The great thing is that you can really tweak every details and make sure that levels and EQ and dynamics between each sound is matching.

@@ShiningNorway That's awesome! Having worked with Kontakt mainly for drum libraries and some orchestral stuff here and there the RAM usage was what I was mainly worried about. I just watched your concert at Hellfest with Emperor after seeing this video, great work! 🔥

Thanks a lot! Glad you liked the show! Yeah, loading the libraries as Aliases as much as you can will help you with the RAM thing. My current computer is a stock MacBook Pro M2, with no extra RAM, and it works great for this.

I've used almost any midi keyboard, and they all do the job. But the Native Instruments are my preferred keyboards.