Guided rig setup
Stagewright can build your first audio graph for you. The guided setup wizard listens to your actual rig — what's plugged in, what makes sound, what sends MIDI — and wires a working rack from it: input chains, mixers, speakers. It runs on plain signal detection (level meters and MIDI traffic), asks you to confirm every guess, and every step is skippable. If you'd rather wire everything by hand on the Blueprint canvas, skip it — the wizard never builds anything you didn't confirm.
When it appears
- First launch on a machine with no saved rig.
- Creating a new rack (the + Add rack menu), unless you clone an existing one.
The result is an ordinary rack: every node, wire and mixer the wizard creates is fully editable on the back panel afterwards. Nothing about a wizard-built rack is special or locked.
Step 1 — Identify your inputs
The wizard watches your audio interface's input meters and all connected MIDI devices, live.
- Audio instruments: make a sound — sing into the mic, strum the guitar. The wizard spots which channel (or stereo pair) came alive and asks you to confirm and name it.
- MIDI instruments: play a few notes. The wizard reports which device the MIDI data arrived from, over its cable. If the instrument also returns audio (a stage piano with line outs), the wizard correlates the notes you play with the pitch it hears and offers to treat the MIDI device and the audio pair as one instrument.
- Devices you power on halfway through are picked up — MIDI inputs are hot-plug monitored.
Every input then gets a role: vocal, guitar, bass, keys, drums, or plain line. The role decides the chain the wizard builds:
| Role | Chain |
|---|---|
| Vocal | Gate → Compressor → Reverb |
| Guitar | Guitar Amp |
| Bass | Compressor → Bass Amp |
| Keys (MIDI-only) | Keys instrument |
| Drums (MIDI-only) | Drum Kit instrument |
| Line / other | straight to the mix |
All chains use the built-in processors, so they work on an install with zero third-party plugins. They're starting points — swap any of them for your own plugins later.
Step 2 — Find your speakers
The wizard never assumes your speakers live on outputs 1-2. It plays a short test tone through each output pair of your interface and asks "hear that?" — the pairs you confirm become the speaker outputs. This matters on aggregate devices and multi-interface rigs where the main monitors can sit on any pair.
Step 3 — The mix topology
- Multi-channel instruments get their own named group mixer ("Keys Mixer", "Drums Mixer") so the instrument has one fader.
- Everything fans into a final Speaker Mixer with one strip per instrument, wired to the speaker pairs you confirmed.
- Mixers the wizard creates are named after their job, and strip labels carry your instrument names.
Your rig is remembered
The identified rig is stored per machine. On the next launch Stagewright reopens your last rack silently — no questions on the way to a working stage.
What it is (and isn't)
The wizard is signal detection, not magic and not "AI": it reads input levels and MIDI traffic, and every conclusion passes through your confirmation. It also can't configure your audio hardware for you — aggregate devices are built in Audio MIDI Setup as usual; the wizard works with whatever device you point Stagewright at.