Contents

Performance Mode

Sometimes you just want to play rather than press play. Performance Mode turns PXR into a live instrument: an on-screen keyboard plus an instrument browser, mixer, effects, and memory, so you can play a connected synth (or the built-in one) by hand. It is marked Experimental and is still a work in progress, so do expect a few rough edges.

Open it with ⌘4 (Display → Performance Mode).

The Performance Mode window, marked Experimental, with a channel selector and a Voice browser (Standard, Bank and Voice pickers), an input device picker with a Panic button, a mixer and sustain pedal, an effects strip, a voice-memory bank of 16 slots, pitch and modulation wheels, and a full on-screen piano keyboard.

The virtual keyboard#

An 88-key on-screen piano. Click keys with the mouse to play, and drag across them to glide between notes.
Hold Shift while dragging to change how hard the notes play (velocity).
Pitch bend and modulation wheels, plus a velocity control.
Notes you play on a connected MIDI keyboard light up here in real time.

The control sections#

Performance Mode is laid out in labelled sections:

CHANNEL: choose which of the 16 MIDI channels you are playing on.
VOICE: pick the sound, in four steps. STANDARD (GM, GM2, GS, or XG), MODEL (the specific model for GS or XG, such as SC-8850 or MU100), BANK, and VOICE. Channel 10 offers the drum banks. When a SoundFont is loaded it appears first in the STANDARD list, so you can play straight from its own instruments, variation banks included.
INPUT: choose the MIDI input device whose notes play through here (or None). Incoming notes light the keyboard.
MIXER: volume and pan for the channel you are playing.
PEDAL: a SUSTAIN toggle that holds notes as a sustain pedal would.
EFFECTS: reverb and chorus send levels.
VOICE MEMORY: store your current setup (voice, channel, levels, effects) so you can recall it instantly. SAVE BANK and LOAD BANK write your collection of setups to a file and load it back, so you can keep a set of go-to voices between sessions or move them between Macs.

Play Along#

Want to play a part yourself? The PLAY ALONG button hands it over: it mutes your chosen channel while the rest of the song carries on, so you take that part live. The channel's notes still appear on the activity strip above the keys, giving you a target to follow. Performance Mode also picks up that channel's current instrument, bank, and volume, so what you play matches the song.