If a dirty little secret exists in the world of live performance, it's the use of backing tracks. Most musicians and engineers would prefer that audiences be kept unaware of the fact that what they're hearing may not all be live. The unfortunate by-product of that hush-hush attitude is that many up-and-coming artists whose music calls for this sort of treatment are totally in the dark about what it takes to play with recorded accompaniment. We've all seen those token synth bands — some of us have even played in them — that throw all their studio tracks on tape, hit play, and wonder why it doesn't sound right and why the audience isn't impressed.
Moving studio-born material into a live-sound situation can be a complicated and time-consuming process. How do you do it? That question has become a bit of a personal obsession for me. As both an editor for Mix magazine and a performing musician, I've had the opportunity to pick the brains of numerous engineers and technicians on major tours and then try out their suggestions onstage. To gain additional insight, I also consulted former Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM drummer and engineer Chris Vrenna (who now records under the name Tweaker), and drummer and engineer Erie Loch of the Sacramento, California — based band Luxt, both of whom have dealt with the backing-track issue during their years of touring.
What I hope to present here is a simple, clear-cut guide to using backing tracks in a typical club setting. I will focus on situations in which a performing band needs to add additional parts — beyond what can be played live — in order to effectively re-create the arrangement of a song's original recording. I won't be dealing with “one-man-band” gigs, which have a different set of problems and require another approach.
MORE OR LESS
Throughout the writing and recording process, many fall prey to the impulse to indulge — there is always another track of this or that, another effect, or another whatever that you can add. Before long, what began as a simple guitar, drum, and bass song has become a 50-track beast, and you're left scratching your head as you try to find a way to play it live. When you're ready to make the move from the studio to the stage, your mind-set has to change. Simply put, less is often more.
The first step is to sit down with your band, boot up your multitrack recorder, call up your mixes, and start muting the tracks that aren't absolutely necessary. Pare down until you're left with only those tracks that are essential for maintaining the core melodic structure of the song — and that you can't effectively play live with your current instrumentation — along with any sound effects and samples you can't live without. Keep in mind that everything, including vocals and live instruments, is going to be crammed through a single P.A. at some point, so save space for the things that really matter.
Next, it's time to figure out who in your band will be playing which parts live. Depending on the music, this may or may not be cut-and-dried. Perhaps what was originally a sequenced synth bass is going to be approximated by a live bass; or you're going to condense your keyboard sounds from five to two instruments; or those three tracks of distorted percussion can be resampled, keymapped, and played live by your keyboardist. The goal is to make the members of the band comfortable with what they're playing and possibly to allow for some degree of improvisation — it is live music after all. This is also a good time to start thinking about what you're going to need gearwise.
WHAT'S LEFT?
So, you've stripped your songs down to their foundations, and everyone in the band knows what they're going to be playing — and now you have the leftovers. These are what will constitute your backing tracks. They're not a crutch or an excuse for anything; they represent staple, yet unplayable, elements of your original studio recording. With proper gear selection and preparation, you should feel as though you're playing with an extra person in your band.
“For Nine Inch Nails, we always tried to keep as much live as possible,” Vrenna says. “All the drums were live; all the guitars, major keyboard parts, and all the vocals were live. The only things that were ever really taped were the synth basses, background noises, and weird loops that you just couldn't play.”
“You also have to learn how to play the songs without the backing tracks,” Loch says. “In case in the middle of a song, if you have to kill [them], you can just keep playing. Most of the time you can do that without anyone really noticing. In a live situation, it's loud, and it's in their face. If a few things fall out of the background, no one is really going to notice. If you have too much stuff in the backing and it goes off, you're going to look horrible.”
MAKING SYNC OF IT ALL
Anyone who has ever played in a live band knows that song tempos often vary from day to day. Between a practice environment and a live setting, tempos can fluctuate appreciably, and the use of backing tracks will strip your band of that flexibility. Currently, almost no standalone products (the Roland VP-9000 is a notable exception) allow for any degree of usable, reliable, real-time time-stretching and audio compression. Again, you'll have to think ahead.
You'll need to settle on a live tempo for each song. Ideally, you should set up as much of your band as possible in the studio — or if you have a more portable recording rig, take that into your rehearsal space — and start running through the songs while playing along with the tracks from your recording that you decided to keep. Does the tempo feel sluggish? Are you fighting to keep up? Make some scratch recordings to check your work, and invite some friends to give their opinions. Finally, try to visualize the audience and then go with your instincts.
Almost without fail, you'll find the need to bump each of your songs — even the heart-wrenching ballads — up a couple of bpm from the tempos at which they were recorded. If you originally generated your backing tracks from MIDI sequences, changing tempo and rerecording them shouldn't present many problems. For audio tracks, minor adjustments can usually be accomplished using the time-compression features found in many popular digital-audio recording and editing software packages. (Remember to make sure you're working with copies of your tracks, not the originals.)
When preparing your backing tracks for stage use, you'll also need to adjust your levels, panning, and effects differently than on the studio mix. Panning can be very important; unless you're on the road with your own P.A. or playing top-shelf venues like the Hammerstein Ballroom (don't we all wish), the P.A. you play through will most likely be mono. Just line everything up at 12 o'clock and move on. Effects, especially reverb, are another pitfall to avoid. If your backing tracks include percussion elements, it's a good idea to back off the reverb almost completely. Leave spatial effects to the front-of-house engineers — it's their space (pun intended), and they know it better than you do.
GOING FOR TWO
Once you've figured out the ultimate tempo for each song and you have a workable mix together, you need to decide on a playback medium. Here you have a number of options. The simplest and most straightforward way to go is to dump your remaining tracks to a stable, portable, 2-track format such as DAT, MD, or MP3.
Because most club P.A.s aren't run in stereo, it makes sense to make your backing mix mono. On one channel, you print the backing material, and on the other, you lay down a reference click track. Be sure to prepare your mixes so that you have consistent levels from song to song. (Using a dedicated 2-track editing program such as BIAS Peak, Steinberg Wavelab, or Sonic Foundry Sound Forge is helpful for that purpose.) Send one channel to the house and feed the click to your drummer (see Fig. 1).
The drummer, who is the only one hearing the click, counts the band in, and miraculously, as the song goes along, your Propellerhead ReBirth synth line, sampled horn parts, or background vocals drop in perfectly in time. Because you've done your homework and leveled things out, whoever is mixing your show sets the channel fader for the backing tracks at 0 dB and never has to touch it again. What could be easier? A small investment that may prove to be a lifesaver is a simple DI box, because a lot of small clubs may have only an 8-channel XLR snake onstage.
“In KMFDM, I played drums on the Money tour,” Vrenna recalls. “What we did, for just ease and expense, was run DAT. Sascha's [Sascha Konietzko, founding member and guitarist of KMFDM] theory was that most of these clubs are mono, and if they do have stereo, we will derive stereo imaging from other sources. So he would just take everything that wasn't going to be played live, which was mostly synth bass and background elements, and print that to the left side of the DAT tape. On the right side we would print click. We'd then make four or five backups. If the DAT machine went down, everyone in the world has a DAT machine, so we could always borrow one for a gig. We would get stereo imaging by putting Sascha's guitar on the right and something else on the left, but not from the background sequences.”
MULTI OPTIONS
Because the sound and overall EQ of club P.A.s are never going to be consistent between venues, you might encounter some situations — especially if your drum parts are being played as part of your background tracks — in which a mono mix doesn't give you enough flexibility. In that case, consider stripping the individual elements you'll be using onto separate tracks of an 8- or 16-track hard-disk recorder or multitrack. Simply bus the backing tracks from your recording rig to the multitrack as discrete mono tracks, arranging them in whatever order feels comfortable. (Zip-disk-based units are unstable and should be avoided.)
When you set up at the venue, send the left master output to the house (see Fig. 2). You can control the levels from onstage and work with the soundperson to get things correctly balanced during sound check. If the kick seems too loud that night, pull it down. If you're mixing yourselves from the stage, have a band member listen from several places in the room to determine how to balance the individual elements.
MIDI-FREE ZONE
Why am I excluding laptops and MIDI playback? Simple: it's a risky proposition that brings needless variables into the equation. Laptops run into the thousands of dollars (not counting the software), and if you or someone else spills a drink on one, it's over. Furthermore, a computer is much more likely to react to changes in humidity and heat. How many times has your home computer failed to boot? Imagine having your Cubase rig freeze in the middle of a set. The only thing that laptops or PCs bring to the table is flexibility. Theoretically, you would be able to extend or shorten a song on the fly by adjusting your loop points or doing a quick cut and paste. For dance and jam bands, that might make sense, though I'd feel much safer triggering two- and four-bar loops from a dedicated sampler.
PULLING THE TRIGGER
Yet another option is to chop everything into loopable one-, two-, or four-bar phrases, dump them into a sampler, and trigger them live with drum pads or a keyboard controller. (Configuring such a setup is a complicated process that could be the subject of another article.)
Whether to employ the triggered-sample approach depends greatly on the musical style. It's an unnecessary headache for most rock and pop bands looking to play bars and clubs, because triggered samples are prone to many types of problems, especially timing errors. Electronic and dance acts that intend to play parties and raves are more likely to benefit from triggering loops because it provides the ability to change things up and extend or shorten songs.
“We went on our first U.S. tour and did everything live,” Loch says. “For backing tracks, I was using triggered samples. I was playing drums, and I'd hit one and have to be on time with that. Honestly, I just liked the mechanical feel of playing to a [recorded] backing track a lot more. A lot of times we would start off a song with a sample as a timing source, and a lot of times we would just have to go on faith.” [Laughs.]
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK
No matter what method you use for playback (except possibly the triggered-loop method) you're going to need a click track for reference. Having the entire band listening to and playing along with the click, however, is unwieldy from both a musical and a technical standpoint. It's best to have just the drummer listening to the click and the rest of the band listening to the drummer.
To make that system work, you'll need to create a click track and build a monitoring system that your drummer is comfortable with, beginning with the click track itself. The click track needs to be made up of sounds that cut through the other elements of the song easily and that alert the drummer as to where he or she is in each measure of the song. You might choose two or three sounds to do that. The first beat of each measure should be a distinctive sound that is heard only on that beat. From there, it's a matter of personal preference. For a particularly fast song, straight quarter notes might be enough, whereas midtempo numbers might require eighth or 16th notes. Of course, you'll need to add two to four bars of click before the beginning of the song, allowing the drummer to count the band in.
“There are so many people that use a cowbell sound with no velocity and everything at 127,” Vrenna says. “And they get totally lost. Even with Nails, we would skip around the tape or replace a song or whatever. And this happened on all the tours where I used tape. If you have to zip forward to something, or backward, and you hit play and it nicks that first downbeat, which one of those cowbells is the one when you've got four empty bars and you're responsible to count the band off?
“I've seen it happen where all of a sudden the drummer starts counting, doesn't have any idea, and what he thought was the one is actually the two because ADATs and DA88s aren't totally accurate when you hit a locate point. And I've seen it just train wreck a song. So I always had extra sounds. Even if I miss the downbeat, I'm like, ‘Whoa, I didn't hear the one — oh there it is, cool. So I've missed the one; I've one bar to go in.’ And I would never make a mistake because of that.”
For monitoring, it really depends on the drummer's needs. Perhaps all he or she needs is a straight click track and nothing else. Most likely, however, a bit more will be needed. Shy of taking an entire mixing console and handling monitoring onstage, a happy compromise that will work in any venue involves outfitting the drummer with a single, wired in-ear monitor for the click track. The concept is straightforward enough: the click comes in one ear, and the drummer gets the stage mix through wedges. The cheap and easy way to do this is to have your playback source, preferably rackmounted, next to the drummer; the left channel with the backing material goes to the house; the right goes to a simple headphone amp and out to the drummer. That setup will work anywhere.
OUTTAKES
Like anything else, successfully playing with recorded backing tracks requires practice. Even so, the risk for major onstage foul-ups is great. “For ease of use, I would much rather play without backing tracks,” says Loch. “If you get off the backing tracks, the entire song is just fucked. You're gone. There is no coming back from that. It's very difficult to play along to backing tracks. And that's one of the misconceptions that people often have.”
Nevertheless, if you set up your system correctly and work out the kinks before doing any actual giggling, you can successfully add recorded elements to your show. If doing so will enhance your sound, there's no reason not to go for it.
