Gig Performer® is an audio plugin host application to allow you to use your Windows PC or Mac along with an audio interface for live music performance. Whether you’re part of a band or a solo artist you can use Gig Performer® to manage all the sounds and/or effects processing you need when you’re on stage.
Gig Performer® provides a free 14 day trial. In trial mode, Gig Performer® will be fully functional for 14 days except for occasional deliberate audio drop-outs during which moments the screen will briefly flash red.
To remove these drop-outs, please purchase the full version. Download Gig Performer here.
Note that the trial version is intended solely to help you determine whether Gig Performer is suitable for your needs and because a trial version is available, Deskew Technologies, LLC does not offer refunds for purchases.
Gig Performer® is designed to run on both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows so the user can work in whichever environment is most familiar and comfortable.
Here is a blog article explaining why and how Gig Performer® came about: Why we created Gig Performer.
As a matter of policy, Deskew Technologies does not participate in any temporary discounted sales during the year. See why here. We do, however, offer a 50% discount to students and full-time teachers at accredited schools and universities. To check eligibility for this special discount, please visit this page for more information.
Gig Performer® supports VST and VST3 plugins (Windows) and VST, VST3 and AU plugins (Mac).
Of course you can! Gig Performer® has a full OSC implementation, so you can use popular Android or iOS applications such as Lemur, TouchOSC or Oscar to control your effects from your tablet or smartphone. You can even control your effects from a Web browser.
A quick internet search will turn up numerous sites on which you can find and download many free VST and AU (Mac only) synth and effect plugins. See this blog article to get started: Top websites for free audio plugins and how to use them in Gig Performer®.
Gig Performer 4 comes with a number of specialized plugins to handle basic MIDI and audio operations. Some third party plugin vendors have kindly provided us with versions of some of their commercial plugins which are used in some of our templates to make it easier for new users to work with Gig Performer if they do not have their own plugins yet.
Yes you can! Download a free trial of Gig Performer, recreate your audio plugin setup and follow these easy steps from this blog article to find out which audio plugin causes problems.
Variations allow you to instantly change the front panel settings of a rackspace. For example, if you have a single rack containing a collection of audio plugin effects such as phaser, flanger, chorus and echo, then different variations would allow you to instantly change multiple parameters so you can switch from just phaser to phaser+flanger+chorus or change the phaser rate, flanger depth and chorus width in one go, rather than having to press multiple pedals and/or adjust multiple dials. Many songs use the same audio plugins connected together in the same way but with slightly different parameters so variations allow you to reuse the same plugins without needing more memory to hold them.
You can organize rackspaces and variations into songs suitable for use in a session or show. Each song consists of one or more song parts and each song part refers to a specific rackspace/variation combination. Widgets values in rackspaces can be temporarily overridden by song parts. In this way, you can easily reuse your rackspaces for different songs and/or song parts, each one appropriately tweaked as required.
The Rig Manager is used to manage a separation of your hardware (keyboards, MIDI controllers, MIDI pedal boards etc) and your rackspace design. This allows you to quickly replace one physical device with another, for example, when you are on tour and your keyboards are backlined. Instead of having to learn how to program or configure keyboards or controllers with which you are not familiar, you can train Gig Performer very quickly to recognize what MIDI events they generate to allow you to use different “rigs” at different shows.
Read more about the Rig Manager here.
A Rackspace is a container for a collection of audio plugins (in the back) wired together any way you like along with a collection of panels (in the front) to control those audio plugin parameters in real time using widgets (knobs, sliders, buttons and so forth). A single rackspace could represent all the elements you need for a song or just parts of a song. You can switch from one rackspace to another instantaneously with no interruption in sound, allowing seamless transitions from one part of a song to another, even in the middle of a bar.
A Panel is a container for “Macros” or “Smart Control” in other products, but a Panel in Gig Performer® is far more flexible. It essentially enables you to bundle a collection of smart controls in individual panels of a rack space.
Sure – our “gig” files can be opened on either platform and as long as compatible audio plugins exist on both platforms, you will be able to use, edit, save and transfer gigs between the two platforms.
This mechanism also works even if not all audio plugins are present on one of the systems. Gig Performer has a built in “Chameleon” plugin that will “pretend” to be the missing audio plugin, obviously not producing any sound, but will turn into a real audio plugin on a system where the audio plugin does exist. This allows you to edit gig files even when some audio plugins are missing, although of course you cannot edit the missing audio plugins.
With apologies, this question, although asked often, is somewhat meaningless.
The latency of any system is a function of the latency of the audio interface plus the latency implied by the sample buffer size divided by the sample rate specified in the application (see table below). So if you set the sample rate of ANY application to 44,100Hz (say) and the buffer size to 128 (say), that application will add 2.90 ms latency.
It doesn’t matter whether one is running a toy computer or the fastest supercomputer in the world!
Perhaps a better question to ask is, “Can I get up on stage, perform in real-time and do a 3 hour show, switching from one set of sounds to another on the fly, turning on/off or adjusting effects instantly and not get stressed out?”
THAT (among MANY other things) is what Gig Performer brings to the table.
Gig Performer does have a tool to let you measure the actual (as opposed to the reported) latency of your audio interface.
We know people are very interested in such things but we worry that focusing on such things just gets in the way of actually playing. Wearing my musician’s hat, my own position is, if I can play and not notice any delay or softness, that’s all that matters.
Of course you can! Gig Performer® has a full OSC implementation, so you can use popular Android or iOS applications such as Lemur, TouchOSC or Oscar to control your effects from your tablet or smartphone. You can even control your effects from a Web browser.
There are many well-known musicians that use Gig Performer. Check out our Gig Performer in Action page, community forum thread, or blog article to see some of the musicians that use Gig Performer.
No definitive answer to that one. Any modern machine running Windows 7 or newer should be fine but certain plugins may have more stringent requirements. If you use a lot of sample-based plugins, it helps to have more RAM but 8Gb would be a reasonable minimum. View this blog article to see how Gig Performer® runs on a very old laptop.
Yes you can! Download a free trial of Gig Performer, recreate your audio plugin setup and follow these easy steps from this blog article to find out which audio plugin causes problems.
Gig Performer® provides a free 14 day trial. In trial mode, Gig Performer® will be fully functional for 14 days except for occasional deliberate audio drop-outs during which moments the screen will briefly flash red.
To remove these drop-outs, please purchase the full version. Download Gig Performer here.
Note that the trial version is intended solely to help you determine whether Gig Performer is suitable for your needs and because a trial version is available, Deskew Technologies, LLC does not offer refunds for purchases.
Yes, as strong believers in education, Gig Performer is available with a 50% discount to students and full-time teachers at accredited schools and universities.
Interested customers will need to provide evidence of their affiliation with the school or university. We regret that this discount is not available to private music teachers.
The discount is available for new purchases only. It does not apply to upgrades and cannot be used in conjunction with any other discounts.
1. Students and teachers with an affiliation to an accredited school, college or university
2. Independent professional music teachers
Please do not submit paystubs or anything that contains private or confidential information.
Click here to submit your request using our online support system.
A single Gig Performer® 4 license allows you to activate up to three computers for your desired platform (Windows or macOS). So buying a macOS license lets you run Gig Performer® on three Mac computers simultaneously and buying a Windows license lets you run Gig Performer® on three Windows computers simultaneously.
We also offer a bundle consisting of both macOS and Windows license, which provides you with 6 activations (up to three macOS and up to three Windows activations).
If you need to run Gig Performer® on a fourth computer, you can deactivate your license on one of your other computers and then activate it on the fourth computer.
Plugin Alliance users can continue to use the current version of Gig Performer® PA Edition that they have purchased or to which they subscribe. However, there will be no new updates available for those products.
If you downloaded the new Deskew version by mistake, you can uninstall it and download the PA legacy version from this website to return to 4.5.8
Plugin Alliance has kindly provided us with a list of links through which you can download legacy PA versions of Gig Performer® . Click here to access that list.
Yes. The price for a cross-grades is listed at the bottom of our store page and we would be happy to welcome you.
The last available release of the PA Unlocked edition of Gig Performer was version 4.58. In mid-August 2023, Deskew Technologies released Gig Performer 4.7 which has many new features. However, as previously mentioned, releases of Gig Performer will after 4.58 will be available only from Deskew Technologies and the Plugin Alliance editions will not be updated.
Visit our Knowledge Base for more questions and information.