July 1, 2017 editorial: comments

Cue the Backing Tracks

Recently, a colleague sent me a link to a video for a computer-based system for touring bands called Playback Control. It syncs your backing tracks, lighting, effects and more to your onstage performance, and provides redundancy to prevent failures. Impressive as it is, the whole idea of backing tracks leaves me cold. Call me old-fashioned, but to me, it's not the same if a band has to pad out its live sound with recorded tracks. 

Playback Control is a high-end professional system, so presumably the acts that use it are quite established. This begs the question, why can't they arrange and play their music onstage without relying so much on recorded tracks?

If there are instruments that are crucial, bring musicians to play them. If that's not feasible, use slightly stripped-down live arrangements. It will probably sound great, and will give the audience something a little different than just a regurgitation of the album. 

I don't want to go overboard here. If you want to trigger some loops in Ableton Live, I have no problem with that. But if a significant amount of what the audience is hearing is coming from recorded tracks, you're straddling the line between live performance and Karaoke.

In the video for Playback Control, there's a clip of some guy saying, "Now you can have a string section, without actually having to pay a 30-piece string section to come out with you." Hrumph. Yes, I know, most tours wouldn't have the budget to hire a 30-piece string section night in and night out, so it's not like this is going to take away a lot of jobs. Still, it bothers me to see them use the replacement of live musicians with recordings as a selling point. 

On Broadway — one of the of the few places where union musicians still hold some sway — the producers have constantly tried to shrink the size of the orchestras and use as much recorded music as possible. The musicians union has fought against it, but it's a never-ending battle. What those bottom-line-focused producers don't seem to get is that there's something about hearing live musicians playing the score for a musical that makes it much more special than if the actors are just singing along to recordings.

As far as I'm concerned, the same is true for concerts. Organic, live-played music is just more compelling.

So what do you think? Am I being a Luddite? I'm curious for your perspective. 

Before I sign off, I wanted to recommend that you check out my interview with Garbage's long-time engineer Billy Bush, somebody who is definitely NOT a Luddite. He talks at length about working with Butch Vig in the studio, including how the drums were miked and the rhythm guitars EQed and a lot more. I think you'll find it a fun and interesting read. 

Back at you in a month.