An interesting perspective on backing tracks from Rick Beato

[DanRH]

I found this very interesting. Love RB BTW!

 

[michaelg]

Personally not a fan of click and backing tracks live.
Heard a wedding band using them a few years back and yes they sounded great out front and quite a bit less than great behind the PA.

 

[Rick Jones1]

I found this very interesting. Love RB BTW!

Thanks for sharing Dan.
I was on a cruse ship years ago and I walked by one of the lounges and heard this band playing some Santana. It sounded great, so walked in to check them out. There were only 3 guys on stage, the guitar player was really playing from what I could tell, but the drummer wasn't playing, he would only hit a crash ever so often and that was it. Can't remember what the 3rd buy was playing. Obviously they were playing to tracks. I left before the song ended and was very disappointed.

 

[AJMcHardy]

I'm one of those guys that play to tracks and a click (at least in one band I play for) and certainly agree with Mr Beato's take on this topic.

If it's there to augment the show then whats the worry?

If lead vocals and all your solos are coming off the hard drive then there are obvious issues.

The one thing I struggle with is the lack of spontaneity with set lists and song choice but this isn't my only band so its not that big a deal.

Also never had a negative comment from an audience member or venue staff about it.

If anything it's more people being curious about how it all works.

 

[JazzDrumGuy]

I was just on a cruise and they had a hubby/wife Latin music duo. She sang. He played backing tracks on Midi style tracks and he simply just layered keyboard sounds. Some of the solos were guitar or horn effects on keys. If you closed your eyes it was 8 people. In reality just one guy. But they were entertaining and sounded good. My 14 y.o. was not impressed, though.

 

[Houndog]

I was just on a cruise and they had a hubby/wife Latin music duo. She sang. He played backing tracks on Midi style tracks and he simply just layered keyboard sounds. Some of the solos were guitar or horn effects on keys. If you closed your eyes it was 8 people. In reality just one guy. But they were entertaining and sounded good. My 14 y.o. was not impressed, though.

Can’t blame them , they don’t have to deal with other band members at least ..

 

[Houndog]

Personally not a fan of click and backing tracks live.
Heard a wedding band using them a few years back and yes they sounded great out front and quite a bit less than great behind the PA.

Isn’t what’s out front sounding good what you want ??

 

[Fat Drummer]

Thanks for posting the vid, I have not run across that one yet... I do love Rick.

I have three ongoing gigs that use a various version of tracks.... The biggest is a Hall & Oats Tribute show.... we run half the show on drum machine loops or off a lap top. With the exception of a sample that plays the first 12 seconds of "So Close" there are NO instrument or vocal tracks at all, 100% live singing and playing with basically a click being the loops of percussion which are such a part of Hall & Oates music. The balance of the night is just played from a visual click I have beside me.

The second one is a local 80's tribute show and again half the night is all tracked, but this time it's heavily tracked with tons of percussion, key and guitar parts but NO vocals at all. Again, the rest of the night is me on a Tama Rhythm Watch watching the lights.

Third is a church gig I play maybe once a month and it's all there less the instruments on stage (always percussion but no drums) and just about everything else is on the tracks including a lot of voices.

I don't mind it, I'm good at it and actually like the songs when it's nothing but a percussion loop playing with me as I love percussion. Im lucky in that none of my main shows are 100% tracked but I do miss the spontaneity, the live magic and the trust built up by live players just going for it. I dont get as many of those oppertunites as I would like in these shows. It's all about the final product and like Rick, thats OK with me but playing live with other people is what inspired me to pick up the instrument and start playing. I wonder if I would do the same today if young and starting out in our current state of music production? Would this hybrid process capture my imagination like the organic magic did in the late 60's and early 70's?

 

[michaelg]

Isn’t what’s out front sounding good what you want ??

Yes and No. I like a good sounding band for sure but I like to hear the truth of the band warts and all and I prefer to hear good human time as opposed to metronomic time.
I'll even go as far as saying that metronomic time has become too dominant in music today and we are loosing something in music because of this.
Great human time is more emotional than machine time to me.

I also tend to like hearing how a band sounds on stage rather than through a big PA.

 

[michaelg]

Not sure if this is applicable to the topic, but on many great records there's just a guitar , bass and drums at times. That's it, no rhythm guitar or keyboard parts underneath filling things out. You can hear this approach on so many records. Police, Rush, Zeppelin, Free, early Lizzy records. And then of course in just about most jazz recordings.
I'm the kind of person who definitely does not want to hear a recreation of the cd at live shows. Guess I'm in the minority.

 

[thejohnlec]

There’s a definite line that can be crossed where I feel it’s too much. I’ve used loops in live situations as augmentation, never as a replacement.

I feel especially strong about this in contemporary church settings, something I’ve been involved in for almost 30 years. The expression of worship should come from the person, not a computer that is playing someone else’s expression of worship. Again, there’s a line - I see a big difference between simple pad or percussive textures and full background vocals with no singers onstage.

Of course, there’s a difference between a generation of music fans who would go to a concert to “see a band” and a generation of music consumers who go to a concert to “hear songs.”

 

[Mcjnic]

To each his own.
I don’t like them.
I also don’t record with ProTools … so I might be WAY outside the box in this one.
Just not interested in mixing that level of tech with my music I guess.

 

[mgdrummer]

Two of my bands use tracks for 90%+ of their shows. Audiences don't complain, venues don't complain. I don't complain because I don't have to share my cut with one more musician on stage.

 

[Tubwompus]

Back in the 80’s, I was half of a sequenced MIDI cheeseball duo. Drummer and keyboard guy. Acoustic kick, snare, and cymbals along with Simmons (gulp) pads for toms and E-snare along with whatever else I needed to trigger in a given song. Also a DW EP-1 kick trigger pedal. (Yeah, I’m old. Bite me.)
We had sampled 3rd and 4th backing harmony vocal parts, bass, whatever we needed. I was using a Roland R-8 for a sound module through a Simmons MTM trigger processor (Lord, so long ago!)

Anyway, it was a really valuable experience for me that’s benefitted me constantly since then. The thing was I wasn’t the timekeeper anymore so I had to listen and place my notes correctly within the proceedings and it was merciless. You were either dead-nuts in the groove or you were suckin’. No room for any middle ground. A bonus was that if you WERE in the groove then you were playing in perfect time. That has a residual mindset for when you WERE the time in a full band. I thank the gods for that time because as a result, I had to develop a mindset that was so helpful when I started playing guitar, bass, and keyboards. Your mind has already worked out the process of how to really listen and be able to slot whatever instrument you’re on at that moment so that it sits in the groove right where it needs to.

 

[michaelg]

Are the use of backing tracks live mostly for commercial reasons ?

 

[GiveMeYourSmallestSticks!]

Not sure if this is applicable to the topic, but on many great records there's just a guitar , bass and drums at times. That's it, no rhythm guitar or keyboard parts underneath filling things out. You can hear this approach on so many records. Police, Rush, Zeppelin, Free, early Lizzy records. And then of course in just about most jazz recordings.
I'm the kind of person who definitely does not want to hear a recreation of the cd at live shows. Guess I'm in the minority.

You make a great point about what can be accomplished without the need for tracks, I couldn't agree more. I agree with RB too though, and I guess part of it depends on the band, the type of music and expectations of the live music experience.

I personally can't imagine even playing to a click live, let alone a pre-determined set of programmed samples. Kudos to those of you that do, it's a skill in and of itself and can be perfectly acceptable if done well. I've heard the Beatles talk about the fact that they really couldn't tour even if they had wanted to in the later years, because there was no way to reproduce their studio creations live. If the string, brass and mellotron parts as well as sound effects and tape loops could be integrated into a fantasy hypothetical live Beatles performance, I personally wouldn't object or find fault with it. However, that's what the Beatles are and what our expectation of them is. There's one version of Here Comes the Sun that everybody knows and expects, not a thousand improvised variations on it.

There are other bands as Rick mentions, that really are about the live experience. I play in a Grateful Dead cover band, and it's all about our ability to play together live, and our ability to reinterpret each song on the spot. There's plenty of structure and planning, but an equal amount of improvisation and inspiration moving us brightly and in different ways each time we play. As a player, I love the spontaneity and the challenge of skirting that line between structure and improvisation, and the chance to get to know, develop and reinterpret a song the more you play it. I also adore the brotherhood that's developed within my band, as the process of playing this way is one of real bonding, listening and intuiting. When this is what your band is about, using tracks is unimaginable. I remember a quote from somewhere discussing Jerry Garcia's playing, and think it aptly describes the whole Grateful Dead live experience. To paraphrase, Jerry was thrilling to listen to live, because you were never quite sure he was going to pull it off, or how he would resolve a passage. It was like watching a high wire act that could fall at any second, but making it to the other side was triumphant and rewarding.

It would be interesting to try playing to backing tracks one day and would likely help me to develop more discipline, especially playing to a click. Something would be lost for me though from the thrill of playing live, the teetering high wire act that through technique, drive, teamwork and careful listening makes it triumphantly to the other side.

 

[michaelg]

If you've learned how to play comfortably with a click at various tempos I think it's actually easier to play with backing tracks then without (once you've got the hang of it).

 

[mebeatee]

So what happens when the machines crash or the power goes out?
bt

 

[Quai34]

The Key is to play AND bring Groove WHILE playing To A click as well. On my band, we play Funk/dance songs ala Nile Rodgers and because we have a drumbox that does the claps (because no drummers wanted to invest in a pad to do them live), and a few percussion but all the rest was live riggered live by me, no computer, no backing tracks. On two songs, I have a TC looper that record live And I play it back at the end of Uptown Funk but I do all the "doos" live, I change the presets live too.
But bass is live with 7 pedals to be closest to the sound as possible, guitar has 15 pedals and switch all the time to be as close as possible to, I have 6 keyboards and one could have 6 parts (stage 2 Nord), the two Dave Smith Prophets can have 2 sounds each and the expander one could have 16 parts and the second one ditto. I could use them to play tracks with a computer but use them more to have allsound prepared and I switch manually but I don't want to take the risk to have a computer that crashes.

 

[drums1225]

So what happens when the machines crash or the power goes out?
bt

When the power goes out, DRUM SOLO!