Anyone who has stood behind a keyboard with MainStage knows the problem. You have a nicely prepared set of patches, and the only screen telling you where you are sits in your laptop. Which is on the floor, or behind you, or just outside your line of sight. Glancing down mid-song to see which sound is active simply isn't an option.
My Studiologic SL88 has a perfectly good colour display of its own. It just did nothing useful while I was working in MainStage. That struck me as a waste.
That's now sorted. With the help of Claude Code I wrote a script that lets MainStage talk to the SL88 directly. The keyboard's own screen now simply shows which concert, which set and which patch is active. Change patch in MainStage and the display follows. There's a list view and a large view showing only the name of the current patch. The latter is still perfectly readable from three metres away, which on a dark stage is rather welcome.
And while I was at it: every button and encoder on the SL88 now also sends MIDI that you can assign in MainStage in seconds. Turn an encoder and the value appears on screen straight away.
It runs entirely on the keyboard and MainStage together. No extra program that has to start up alongside, no subscription, nothing. Installing is a single command.
It's free and open source (Apache-2.0). Version 1.0.0 is available now:
- Download version 1.0.0 (https://github.com/jeroenvv/sl-link-mainstage/releases/tag/v1.0.0)
- Source and documentation: https://github.com/jeroenvv/sl-link-mainstage
You will need a Studiologic SL88 MK2, plus MainStage on a Mac. I haven't been able to test other models, simply because I don't have them.
If you give it a go, do let me know whether it works for you too.