Exporting channel strips from Logic Pro to Mainstage

Just a quick tip here as to how to “correctly” export entire channel strips from Logic Pro to Mainstage, since it seems to be secretly (or possibly not at all) documented. Anyways, one can save channel strip settings in Logic Pro and open them in Mainstage through the usual mechanism, however the problem is that this only works for an individual channel. If you have an instrument such as Ultrabeat and have placed effects on several individual instruments, then it seems you cannot directly import these into Mainstage.

In Logic Pro X, plugins with multiple output channels (like Ultrabeat) show the individual outputs in a group, and each one of the channels in the group can have their own channel EQ settings and effects, which is extremely useful especially for doing drums. However, these files get exported into a special folder in Logic’s default preference location, and such files don’t show up in Mainstage when loading channel strip settings.

It turns out that it is possible to import an entire instrument and all of its grouped channels, however this cannot be done by saving channel strip settings. Instead, one must create a patch.

To do this, select the instrument you want to export in Logic Pro, and make sure that the instrument channel is selected (and not one of the individual channels in the group). Then open the Library by clicking the button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and click “Save” in the lower right-hand part of the Library panel.

Now in Mainstage don’t create a new channel, instead click the gear icon to the right of the “+” at the top of the “Patch List” panel. At the bottom of this menu there is an option named “Load Patch/Set”. When you select this option, you can now load your saved patch from Logic, with almost all channel settings correctly saved!

I say “almost” because the one thing that’s not saved is volume settings. This is a bit sad though understandable, however it means that if you are mixing drums in Logic and want to set exact levels which should be respected by Mainstage, then you are better off using the Channel EQ’s “Gain” feature rather than the mixer volume.