![]() All of that has risk factors built in that can go wrong if you don't remember everything and do it right every time. I have successfully used loopers but everything has to be right. The accompaniment keyboards, even the better ones can sound cheesy. Being a keys player/guitar player I've toyed with all kinds of ideas. ![]() Alternately you could send both the click and the audio out to the house who could then send it back to individual listeners separate. That mixer serves the drummer with L/R panned. No matter what you use to play the tracks the general technique seems to be this: Take a 1/8" stereo male from playback device to 2 x 1/4" male mono plugs > into dual D-box>send the audio side out to the house> using a d-box with through jacks, attach short 1/4" cables from the through jacks on both sides to a small mixer. I have a drummer who will need a click to play backing tracks. One guy who does a lot of one man band gigs is ripping karaoke files with a Youtube downloader, importing them into windows media player and adding the words into it so he has a scrolling teleprompter when he sings. Lots of folks are downloading a 4.99 app and using their iPad or iPhone to play the tracks. I have been pouring over Youtube to see what others have done or are doing. I'll be interested to see how this progresses as well. Things to ponder Is it better to use pure midi or pure audio, which is more stable? Why do you need multi track output and how do you set this up? What do you use for lyrics? Other than Sonar what do you find works the best for live playback? Please add your set up and ideas and yes for sure ask questions. I am going to give Sonars Playlist a try someday but the only reason is so I will have MIDI to control my effects. At this point I see no advantage to having say 3 tracks output. I proof them through the PA and have a few tricks I use to keep everything the same song to song. Because it's dead simple to make a mix of 3 instruments I've rarely had balance issues with my tracks. And I also control it with a USB foot switch. You can re arrange the GUI to fit your screen. It will re open with your set list intact even if you forgot to save it. You can drag the songs around on the set list on the fly. The most important for me is you can set it to Manual Playlist advance. I choose Win Amp because it does a few things no other player seem to do. I'll give you my system which I've used since 2004. So making the tracks is easy with Sonar but now lets chew on how to work with this live on stage. Bass and drums are what keep time so now you need to follow a click track or? Will get into that latter as the thread progresses. ![]() Where it becomes tricky is when you have a real bass player or drummer. Keyboard and drums backing tracks all you need is a stereo or even mono mix. Those are the 3 instruments midi does best and if you, like me have those 3 instruments playing following the backing track is straight forward. Please don't even attempt to use midi for guitar parts or I will personally come and unplug your PA :) For Bass. Many top 40 bands have relied on sequencers to fill in the holes when they didn't have a Keyboard, Bass or drummer. I don''t believe in overdoing it or we can be walking a fine line between a musician performing and a Karaoke singer. I now include keyboards in every song to provide 'glue". The reason was disk space if you can believe that. Very few of my old tracks included piano, organ or keyboard parts. Most importantly is what instruments do you require? For most of my gigs I've used a pretty sparse backing of just Drums and Bass. So first there are many approaches to using backing tracks. For me that's all been replaced by a little Asus netbook that weighs about 4lbs. I lugged an Atari 1040 ST to 100's of gigs along with a rack of sound modules and effect units all weighing over 100lbs. Those sound modules that were on par and often worse than MS Wavetable sounds cost $$$. Originally we used midi sequences to drive outboard hardware synths. Not only can you use midi but we can also mix in real instruments as part of the band. As someone who started with a Roland 505 for drums and a Korg Poly 800 playing Bass ( very badly) what we now have is amazing to me. It's a great midi sequencer and it's included VST's are all you need to create a pretty good sounding backing band. ![]() As far as creating backing tracks goes Sonar for me is king of the hill. I thought a thread to share ideas and what works and what doesn't work might be a good resource for people kicking the tires. Every once in a while someone asks this question and I know there are many of us here who play live using backing tracks. The "Sonar for Live Performance Backing track" Thread Please keep topic to Backing tracks for traditional Rock, country, Jazz and Folk.
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