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Backing Tracks + Full Band

#21
I have seen 4 piece entertainment bands do it (the kind of show where the lead singer changes his costume for every song, and pulls props into the show to get the crowd involved.) This band overdubs the bass and guitar so they can all dance while the music plays. There is also another hugely successful cover band that has over 8 people in the full band, and they still track a lot of stuff throught the whole show. Our guitarist has actually monitored that track channel during one of their shows. He said that there was a lot going on.
Wes
 
#22
Wes Whitmore said:
I try not to complain too much on here, but it surprises me how many musicians find it OK to track so much material at a live show. This is my biggest pet peave I have on cover bands in my area. These are some really well trained musicians that make a good living putting on this show of lies, even in the small/medium sized bars. Bands are tracking vocals, synth, and studio punch-ins, even bass and guitar parts, that they cant do live on thier own to get a "larger than life" sound.
They have a Macbook or a bank of samplers right in reach of the drummer. The crowd doesn't know enough to notice that they hear, but dont see, a keyboard or synth, or multipart hamonies when only one person is even remotely close to the mic, etc.
How do I still hear the bass and guitar if they both stopped playing so they can do a little dance number together? Why is the guitarist turning around and hiding his hands during that tricky guitar intro that they decided to track so they wouldn't loose count of the click?
Unfortunatly, 80% of the top cover bands in Columbus are tracking now. The soundguys are usually surprised that we don't have a track source for them. We usually joke to them that if you wanted to hear a track, you should have hired a DJ or rented a Karaoke machine...
Im not going to change anyone's mind about tracking, I just wanted you to know that people are paying attention to what you are doing...
Wes
Click to expand...

I saw a highly touted cover band in the st. Louis area doing this and it blew my mind that no one seemed to notice. It also took away from the show in my opinion. My cover band doesnt get gigs as good as the band I saw, but Im fine with that if thats how it comes across
 
#23
The reason they get away with it is because the people in the room are 99% non-musicians. That's something that a lot of cover bands forget..... which is a bad thing in terms of song selection. Fancy targeting your performance to 1% of the audience. It's more than a little bit crazy.

Having said that, no-one has ever accused us of over implicating our backing tracks. the musician in us has to show "some" pride in what we do, even if it is just covers....
 
#26
longfinger said:
How about hiring a keyboard player to take care of this and make it a quartet?

I'm curious to those in bands who use backing tracks, does a band maker make them and if so does said band member get paid more for all the work needed to make the tracks?

ie trio salary division without tracks
1/3 , 1/3, 1/3

as a quartet
1/4, 1/4, 1/4, 1/4

as a trio with tracks made by one member
1/4, 1/4, 2/4 for guy who made the tracks

What are you guys doing?
Click to expand...

Not sure about your parts of the country.... venues around here are requesting smaller footprint (and noise) bands.

running with fewer people allows in nontraditional venues..... take home a few more bucks... and carry less gear.

Tim
 
#27
Quality of sound in touring rigs ia a whole nother discussion. There is usually so much noise and filler that i cant even tell where they are in the song from time to time.

Lady gaga isnt playing cover songs to 100 seat bars. We did play with Joe Jonus once and he brought his tracks, but it was a solo show.
Wes
 
#28
Pretty common everywhere including arena acts. You'll have to get used to the idea. Absent 3 keyboardists and two additional female backing singers on stage our 5 piece 80's band couldn't pull it off without the additional synth tracks. The music and budget simply require it and it's meaningless and irrelevant to the paying customers, event planners.
 
#29
Hi, I play bass in a kind of Arena-Rock band. ( Drummer, electric guitar, and a singer on acoustic guitar/piano.)
We wan't to get our live sound a bit bigger and I was thinking that we could use a sort of pedal to play backing tracks.
I've been reading alot on forums and the things that I feelt was closest to my thoughts were the "Loopers", such as the "Boss RC 30" and the "Digitech Jamman". Now I'm wondering if there is other and better pedals? With the storage and backing track functions.
I would like to be able to switch between samples, that we put on the device by a computer, very fast and with my foot as I'm playing the bass.
Thanks for the answers! :hyper:
 
#31
i'm in the exact type of band you are describing. we've managed to use Ableton Live 8 and a SoftStep foot controller to really make some big sounds...do a lot of MGMT, Talking Heads, Vampire Weekend type covers and Ableton really helps us achieve that sound nicely. We just send the drummer a click (we all use in ear monitors) and jam like anybody else would...and once you've really got good with Ableton you will see that it's kinda like an instrument itself. we also use Ableton with our original music. besides the sounds, Ableton doesn't ask for a 1/4 of the cash at the end of the night either.

a word of advice: don't overdo it, because then it gets mushy and cheap and very hard to balance (unless you have a soundman with you all the time). focus on the sounds that really matter, and perform/record them yourself at home and rehearse with it A LOT. trust me, it's going to pay off.
 
#32
Petebass said:
The reason they get away with it is because the people in the room are 99% non-musicians. That's something that a lot of cover bands forget..... which is a bad thing in terms of song selection. Fancy targeting your performance to 1% of the audience. It's more than a little bit crazy.

Having said that, no-one has ever accused us of over implicating our backing tracks. the musician in us has to show "some" pride in what we do, even if it is just covers....
Click to expand...

What he said.

The only people that even remotely care if you use backing tracks are other musicians that happen to be at said gig. The majority of your audience is either too happy that you sound just like the song they wanted to hear or too drunk to care.

Having said that, we've never used any backing tracks, but I don't think any my bandmates would be opposed to having some keys or horns tracked, since none of us plays those...
 
#33
Years ago I played in an (original) band that used some backing tracks. We could not find a (decent) lead guitar player who could learn all the songs in time for the first show, so the lead singer played guitar on most songs and keys on a couple others, whichever was most featured in the song. the backing tracks included whichever he wasn't playing.
We had a rackmount hard disk recorder run by the drummer with all the songs loaded in a row. There were multiple outs on it for stereo synth, guitar, and click. After that we just kept it a trio for the next year rather than try to integrate another member, cuz the audiences did not seem to notice or mind the backing tracks.

on the other hand

The cover band I'm in played an early show last saturday so I stopped in on my way home at a club we play all the time to see if another band was playing there that night. The band was a quartet and I actually spent thirty seconds looking for the keyboard player. (the song was caribbean queen). I had no problem with 80's style synth pads through a song as backing tracks. What self-respecting keyboard player wants to do that for a whole song? But I rolled my eyes when I noticed that the little guitar licks that come in the chorus frequently were also on the backing tracks.
Then the saxophone solo started. There must have been five people who came up to the band and yelled "where's your saxophone player, ha ha!"
How embarrassing. :rollno: If you use tracks try to be tasteful about it!
 
#34
Hi,

We use a few backing tracks just on a few songs, mostly to cover those odd ball instruments that we don't have, weird synths, layered acoustic guitars, steel guitar, banjo, but never vocals, bass, drums, etc, the stuff we have in our band already.

The drummer uses a Roland SPD-SX and loads it up with custom backing tracks from sources like Invalid Link Removed. For a small fee per tune you can either download the entire tune with all the tracks and edit it, subtract instruments, change the key, include a count in, etc, or you can edit it onsite and download only what you need.

Check this out....

Invalid Link Removed

KRB-Ranch-0329014-002_zps9dc5225f.jpg


You can use Acid Loops or other music editing software on your tune if you download the entire piece.


Thank you for your indulgence,

BassCliff
 
#35
I use karaoke-version for my tracks too. What I do is download the individual mp3's for each track and put them together in Audacity. Pan the track hard one side and the click hard the other side. Drummer and whoever else wants it get the click and the track
goes to mains and monitors with a Y cable. Start with an 8 count click, 4 for the drummer, 4 for the band. Enjoy!
 
#36
Every song my band does involves a backing track. Mostly it's percussion, some synths and vocal harmonies. Sometimes I need the click, sometimes the guitarist needs it. Sometimes nobody needs it.

As far as those who regard this as some kind of "cheat," all I hear is "get off my lawn." I'm sure people said similar things about amplification, multitrack recording, effects, synthesizers...

The fact is, my group is being appreciated both for our skills as producers of these tracks as well as for being live performers. I have no problem with this and neither does our audience.
 
#37
It used to be an Akai MPC + some synth/sampler module,
Now all is in the macbook pro with Logic/Live.

Some of drummers and some other musicians never use click, but instead some kind of simple more musical percussion track like conga etc,..which for some of the songs is the part of arrangement (audible to audience,.. although the musicians got it louder than the audience, in that case). Most of them prefer that than a rigid 'click' click.metonome track, even if the sound of the click/metronome is also conga LOL.

I used to feed the FOH with stereo mix of the backing track, but there are times when I feed them 8 or more channels.
 

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