local bands; live or memorex?

[Al.C]

I was talking to my brother the other day (he is an amp tech) and he tells me one of his clients was telling him that his band has been using pre-recorded tracks at the local clubs. Claims the sound guys like the ability to control the volume and keep the mix balanced. Now I remember bands like ELO being accused of doing this in the late 70's - early 80's but is this a common practice at the club level???

[north]

I play the LA clubs all the time and yes I have seen this more and more with other bands we play with..we recently did a sound check at a club on the strip and after we finished our check (We really play everything and use no tracks..) ..we watched the next band check while we were getting ready to go to dinner at the Bow before the show.. well this was a Goth band that I heard is sort of getting big on the strip...they are a full band but at the check it was just the drummer and the singer..well as soon as the drummer clicked off his count low and behold there was a whole band playing and huge Def Leppard back ground vocals to boot.....I thnk the lead singer was singing a little but it seemed like everything was pre recorded... of course when they played that night at the show it sounded perfect......to me that's totally fake but whatever.. ..I personally would never do it.....I'm all about really playing and making it sound great for real.....

[Low_fidelity2100]

Weird, I've never known any local bands (around here) to do something like that...There's a few bands that use backing tracks (i.e. all they're synth sounds are pre-recorded, cause they don't have a synth player)...But I don't see that as being the same thing, as just going up on stage and Pretending to play. An really even with the few guys I know that do the "pre-recorded synth track" thing...They only use the backing tracks on songs where its impossible for anyone else to just play the synth part live (i.e. songs that require Two guitarists, so both guys are busy playing guitar...or songs with a Bassline that is 100% crucial to the song, meaning 1 of the two Guitarists has to play bass, and the other has to play guitar)...anytime it is possible, someone is actually playing synth live on stage.

Pretty sure completely faking it, is not common place...Anywhere.

Also, why would a band that isn't actually playing on stage (just faking it)...even need an amp tech?

[Koreth]

A buddy of mine used to work at Guitar Center. He told me of a time he was once ordered to deliver an order of drums to the Hoobastank show that was in town that night. He claims when he was backstage, he discovered the entire show was a pre-recorded Pro Tools session fed directly to the venue's sound system, with everything else purely for show. That's the only time I've heard of such. I'm not sure whether I believe his story or not.

I personally have never done such, but the last band I played in did use backing tracks. There were some sound FX, synth and orchestral parts to the songs. But only those parts were on the backing tracks. Everything we had a live instrument for (drum, guit, bass, singer) was played live.

Running backing track offered another advantage beyond just having sound FX and an orchestra to back us. We put the drummer on a click track (pre-recorded metronome, whatever the term for it is). With the backing track and the click track panned hard left and hard right on a mini MP3 player, a simple 4 channel mixer and some basic in-ear monitors, we could send the backing track to the board for the sound guy to mix into the mains with everything else. Also the drummer could mix the click track back into his monitor feed from venue's system, and control the levels of each without having to wave to the sound guy between the songs to turn anything up or down.

Having a click track in in-ear monitors allowed our drummer to stay very tight, and thus the rest of the band. The most common compliment I can recall from audience peoples was how tight our timing was. My sense of rhythm and timing is mediocre at best (working on that), but it sure is a lot easier to stay in time when the drummer is locked in perfectly to click-track or metronome.

The main disadvantage of running such a setup was that we were locked into playing the songs exactly the same time every time without exception. Consistency is good, but we had to play the songs exactly as they were on the recordings that were to go on the album. There was no room for improvisation, or the whole song would fall apart.

[Wattage]

I know a number of bands that use iPods to fly in backing tracks all the time.

[Shadow1psc]

Unless of course you kept in time with 1-2 bar improv/pauses, but I see what you mean as far as tempo/freeform/jazzing things up is concerned. Sometimes you just want to break out in a jam when everyone's feeling it!

[tone4days]

never have done it
dont think my band is good enough to play to any backing tracks - we'd never hold sync