Show File Podcast S01E01 – Backing Tracks – Show Notes

What are backing tracks

Parts of an original recording to be performed to on stage
    Comes down to who you have playing on stage

Why use backing tracks?

Filling gaps where you dont have or it's not practical to have a player playing the part

Where do we start?

STEMS

What are they?
    Individual parts of a track
Where would you get them from?
    Artist
    Producer
    Mix Engineer
    Other?
Good practices?
    Be organised
        Store them sensibly
    Stem names
    If you're re-bouncing them do it _transparently_

Without these stems there’s no backing tracks
If you’re really fucked you have to make them.
If this is the case though should you even be using them?

How are we going to play them back?

What are our options? there are lots of types of Playback System
Hardware Playback or Sampler
Pros & Cons
Normally very simple boxes that only have 1 job so are harder to crash
Don’t really need someone to babysit
Hard to edit
Have to just play the song from top to bottom. Can’t skip to different parts of the song easily
Can waste a lot of time in rehearsals and programming
Software
Pros & Cons
Very flexible for number of outputs, control, inputs etc
Quick and easy editing
Can play from any part of the song super easily
Generally needs a babysitter to be reliable
Quickly can become very expensive
You’ll need redundancy really
Neither are better. It’s all about the gig you’re doing.
DAW vs. DAW they’re all shit
Obviously we prefer Ableton but you can still have a great show with Logic or Tools. the best one is the one you can program with quickly.

Let’s make some backing tracks for our different playback systems!

Playback 1 (Stereo Pair): 404
Bounce stereo pair, playback on 404
Don’t gate don’t loop
It might be hard to keep in time with this sometimes. We’ll need a click.
click tangent
Bounce tracks L click R
Yay we can play an amazing show now!

Playback 2 (Simple Multitrack): SPD-SX Pro
Sum some of our stems in to groups!
Music
BV
Click
This is most common 5 track split
Can still have same problems

Playback 3 (Scalable Multitrack): DAW & an Interface
We can basically use our Ableton session for this!
Split it across a PA12
Playback control?
Needs to stop at the end of the song. REMEMBER THAT!!!
MIDI Mapping
Ableset/Setlist manager
Control with a phone!

Clicks:
a metronome to keep people in time with the backing track
Can use them for cues, stage directions, tuning etc
REALLY USEFUL
you can make them a million different ways!

Omg so cool you’re running backing tracks nowwwwwwwwww