Card groups
Isolate one instrument's
whole signal path.
A real rig is half a dozen signal chains sharing one canvas, and the moment you go in to change the guitar line, everything else is still competing for your attention. Marquee-select the cards that belong together, hold Shift to extend the selection, then click + Group to save them as a named chip in the top-left corner. Click the chip and the rest of the rig recedes: every card and wire outside the group dims, so what is left in front of you is the guitar line, end to end. Press Esc, or click the chip again, and the whole rig comes back.
Wiring
Wire your rig like a graph,
not a spreadsheet.
Wiring is Stagewright's canvas. Drag plugins, MIDI nodes, and audio buses onto a graph that snaps, aligns, and groups the way modern design tools do. Audio cables and MIDI cables are visually distinct, type-aware, and refuse to land where they shouldn't. Every cable lights up with real signal, so you can debug a dead patch hop by hop without leaving the canvas.
Guided setup
Plug in, make a sound.
Stagewright wires the rest.
On first launch, and whenever you add a new rack, a setup wizard listens instead of handing you an empty canvas. Sing into the mic or play a few notes: it watches the input meters and MIDI traffic, spots which channels came alive, pairs a MIDI keyboard with its audio returns by matching the notes you play to the pitch it hears, and asks you to confirm and name every instrument. Then it builds a working rig: a sensible chain per instrument, a group mixer where one is needed, and a speaker mixer wired to the outputs you actually hear.
Built-in processors
A fresh install
makes sound in minutes.
Stagewright ships seven native processors: Gate, Compressor, Reverb, Keys with E-Piano and Piano voices, a Drum Kit with electronic and acoustic kits, a Guitar Amp, and a Bass Amp. They are deliberately lightweight, CPU-cheap starters, there so a new rig makes sound with zero third-party plugins installed. They are not replacements for a professional plugin library; that library is the point, and VST3 and AU hosting stays first-class. When your favorite piano or channel strip arrives, the built-ins step aside.
Stage
One flat screen,
built for performance.
Stage is the play-side companion to Wiring. Build a single screen of large knobs, faders, pads, and meters bound to whatever matters in the song. Controls are drawn as instruments because a performer mid-song has no time to decode abstractions, but the realism stops where function ends: no faux-LCD fonts, no fake screws, no vintage wear. Semantic color, system typography, motion under 200 milliseconds. The moment you enter Stage every authoring affordance disappears, so what is left on screen is exactly what is bound to MIDI.
Rig editing
Build your control surface
in minutes, not evenings.
Flip into edit mode and the palette is right there: knobs, faders, drawbars, pads, meters, tuner, metronome, pedals. Drop a control on the rack grid, size it, color it, label it, and bind it by touching the knob on your hardware. The inspector keeps every detail one click away, and anything marked helper-only stays hidden when you perform.
Rack templates
Start from a template,
not a blank panel.
Add a rack and pick a starting point: an eight-strip band mixer, a single-channel guitar amp head, a stage-keyboard surface, a pedalboard, or an empty rack. Templates carry the layout, controls, and colors; you connect them to your own plugins and hardware afterwards.
Songs & setlists
Rehearse once.
The sound follows the setlist.
A song is a snapshot of your entire sound: which effects are on or bypassed, every plugin parameter, and the mixer's levels, pans, mutes, and solos. Recalling one applies everything in milliseconds with a short, click-free glide. No plugin reloading, no audio dropout, no rebuilding anything between songs. Arrange songs into a setlist, step through it with previous and next, and when the set crosses into a different rack, Stagewright handles the switch. A free update for every 1.x license.