advice with live tracks/pre-recorded stuff/not like the other thread

[numrologst]

This is kind of along the lines of the thread about playing pre-recorded backing tracks... It was obvious in the other thread about pre-recorded tracks..> There are people who like it and people who don't....

But basically we are coming to finishing up over a year long album... Very experimental, very sonics oriented... First off we are basically a 2 man band... We play most of the stuff in the studio, but do quite often use session players in the studio..> And we hire all session players for live...

But regardless.. Even if we are going to hire the best of the best for drums and bass... We still are going to have problems creating the sonic layers live...

And really, the sonic layers are what make the song powerful, unique, and they are what make the songs, the songs...

Basically aside from drums, bass, and guitars...There are huge amounts of sonics that create an atmosphere...

For instance... We have some songs that ARE basic songs... Drum, Bass, Guitar... But there are layers of organs, pianos, elec pianos, noises, synths, percussions, string sections, horns, etc...

For instance again we got a track that is very organic.. But with a line up like this:

Drums, Bass, Mandolin rhythm section
Then we have multiple guitars playing diamonds, lap steel, piano, organ, tambourine/shakers/claps, elec piano, and banjo... All with a pretty weird
arrangement

To pull an organic song like that off, we'd have to be at least a 7 piece and still not be able to reproduce the song the way we want...

Then a more typical track is:

Drums, Bass, Rhythm guitar, Lead Guitar, organ, piano, sting section, singe horn, electric piano

And that's it for the more organic instruments... But then we also have farfisa, toy piano, multiple synth layers(pads and noises)... Wind noises...Birds chirping as well as electronic drums and bass parts... But still very organic and rocking...

I don't want to sound 100% like the album... But i really do want to create some of the atmospheres and sonics... And I don't want to travel with a 15 piece band. Maybe we have to...

I look at people like Sufjan Stevens that do travel with huge bands and it works...

Then I look at bands like Wilco..> Who have the huge layers going on with a 6 piece... Or Of Montreal who are a six piece but do alot of recorded tracks live.

So I'll get to my point in my next post.

[numrologst]

So now that you have some background information... The point of this post is that i am trying to figure out what i need to do as far as getting the tracks ready for a live show rehearsal.

I mean we're not even sure at this point if a backing track will work...

But we at least have to get to the point of having the backing track... 90% of the album was recorded to 2"... Lots of dumps to digital, lots of submixing, and tracking back to tape. And that is a whole other thing in itself...

but after we get all the tracks into digital, and after we're done with mixing...

How do we get the tracks ready for live... All the tracks are tight and in time and all that...

But how do we go about making a backing track..> Anyone know of any specialists in this area???

[bishopthomas]

You don't have to justify it to us, it's your creation. You almost seem ashamed. Anyway.... What kind of venues are you playing? Do you travel with your own sound engineer? Backing tracks usually sound better if they are mixed individually at the venue, so putting each track to a multitrack machine would make sense. If you are playing bars and clubs then just take a CD, minidisc, iPod, whatever. Just make sure you have your own playback equipment and cables to interface with house consoles. You'll also most probably need to play with a click track. Maybe just your drummer wears headphones and counts off songs, or you could all go to in ear monitors.

[numrologst]

our drummer plays to a click on 85% of the songs anyway... I like the idea of having a multitrack mix... We are about to get a new live engineer. Playing mostly festivals, theaters, etc.

[stuntbutt]

I'm a long time house engineer. I used to work with a band that used backing tracks. Here's how we did it: After each song was mixed in the studio 8 stems were created. 1 click and 7 mono audio tracks of stuff that would not be played live. I had a 4x6 card of notes for each song to help me sort out the backing tracks.

For performance, the drummer controlled playback. The click was fed to a personal headphone amp (ART?) and the the other 7 tracks were fed via a 20' snake that terminated in male XLRs. They were clearly labeled 1-7. The drummer played by listening to a click only, however if he had wanted to hear the backing tracks we could have used the unballanced outs frfom the ADAT to feed a rack mounted 8 channel mixer. If I remember there was a female voice anouncing the song to the drummer on his click channel avoid confusion.

This kind of setup only works if you have your own engineer that is familiar with your material. I have experienced a few bands lately that just use an ipod, usually into a mini Behringer mixer. The drummer uses the built in headphone amp to monitor, making it possible to hear just click or click + backing tracks. Then an aux send feeds a dedicated DI for backing tracks to the house system. The slickest of them will have the ipod, mixer and DI all velcro'd to a piece of plywood. The DI should be labeled "Backing Tracks".