Are You Using a MBP for Backing Tracks in Live Performances?

[ggm1960]

For many years I used a MBP with MOTU Digital Performer and 828mk3/x interfaces. I used the same basic setup with varying external equipment in bands and later, with my duo (wife and I) as an enhancement rather than a focus of performances. Primarily I've used it to run MIDI to a keyboard for backing tracks. It's a reliable, flexible and capable system but can be rather complicated to setup and requires a fair amount of cabling. The details could fill a couple pages but I'm trying to keep this brief because I'm not sure if this topic is of much interest here.

I created all the backing tracks myself, you could call it a labor of love but actually it was typically time consuming and often tedious. We stuck with this setup as we moved from a midwest area with a thriving music scene to a less populated area in the southwest. Last year I decided it would be fun to return to an actual live band so we added a bass player and drummer. Our focus has always been radio friendly classic pop/rock music with a leaning towards country rock.

It certainly has been fun but there's a real lack of decent paying gigs in this area and I'm considering returning to my backing track setup. We saw an extraordinary shift in musical culture after our move. For context; the most popular act here is a guy that plays bass and sings to iPad backing tracks, another act has a guy playing guitar to iPad backing tracks while his wife sings and dances around. I'm rather astonished by this, where I'm from they'd be laughed off the stage as circus sideshow acts! Additionally karaoke is incredibly popular here and people take it seriously. Where I'm from it's a pass time in small bars. There is an audience for the stuff we do but here, country music reins supreme.

I've certainly rambled on here but I guess what I'm really interested in knowing is what type of setup others may be using for live performances if you're a single/duo act with backing tracks. I wish there was a way to simplify my setup and I suspect all these things also varies a great deal by location.

 

[MajorFubar]

I don't perform personally but I do make backing tracks with some local singers. They store our backing tracks on their iPod Classics, which are long in the tooth now but have yet to be beaten for this purpose. The singers don't need our GarageBand and Logic projects when performing, so taking a laptop would be ridiculous overkill. I keep separate Apple Music libraries for each performer, so providing I remember to open the correct library by option-clicking the Music app on launch, everything just auto-syncs with their respective iPods.

It's too bad Apple discontinued iPod Classics, they were brilliant for this purpose. Headphone socket to interface it directly with the venues' desks, small (yet not too small), light, easy as pie to navigate and choose tracks as a playlist, plus they can practise with corded headphones wherever they want. My clients have been using them for nearly 20 years and will basically use them until the iPods die of old age.

 

[ggm1960]

I don't perform personally but I do make backing tracks with some local singers. They store our backing tracks on their iPod Classics, which are long in the tooth now but have yet to be beaten for this purpose.

That seems like an interesting gig, obviously you don't do that for free?

 

[MajorFubar]

I do actually. I enjoy that it gives me a purpose to create. That's my payment. It's an arrangement that also allows me to say no without feeling guilty.

 

[klspahr]

I have used MainStage for a band my wife had. She wrote an album and we recorded it in Logic. Tracks consisted of percussion (a set of Roland pads), lead keys, bass keys, along with lead vocal and backing vocals. So all the midi voices, vocal tracks and effects were moved directly from Logic to MainStage. I set it up so MainStage had the ability to play each recorded track and also had the ability to play each track live. The standard set up was my wife and another woman. My wife would sing lead and play lead keytar. The other woman played bass keys and sang harmony. Some songs had percussion lead which would be played live on the Roland pads. But my wife could also perform by her self by turning on the recorded bass and backing tracks in MainStage. I also had a screen on stage that they could watch and for each song there was a count in and a scrolling lyrics display. She could select the next song from buttons on her keytar and see the selected song displayed on the screen. Since we had the actual effects we used on the album we told the sound man to do nothing since each song had the exact effects we wanted. This MainStage setup also had a full software mixer built in that I could adjust wirelessly with my iPhone. MainStage worked perfectly and I was using a 2011 MacBook Pro at the time. She retired that act a while ago but I did load it onto my M1 MacBook Air and it runs great and I would bet it would handle a ton more tracks.



You can build any sort of audio setup you can imagine with this software. It is amazing for $30.