Recording Tracks for live band

[SGPIANOMAN]

In my group (we do christian music), we have a "live band", however our musicians are keyboard and drums. To me, i feel that we are lacking that full sound. Of course, its tough to find commited and talented bass players, rhythym players, lead players ect. My solution is to do what other groups of the genre do, have live musicians who play to tracks with the other music. For example, we are playing keys and drums live but on the track is the bass, rhythm guitar, lead...ect. One of the top drummers in the genre told me how he personally does his tracks. They record the click to the left channel, the other music to the right. I'm just trying to figure out how it would come out in concert, what would the chain be to get that click to the drummer (or other musicians) and just the music to the monitors/main speakers. I'm guessing that there would be 2 mixers involved. Possibly running the right channel into the main board, and the other channel into another board to get the desired effect. If i can be clearer on this topic, please feel free to ask questions so i can clarify. I'm looking foward to ya'lls advice

[Brightside]

I think this solution would depend on your exact set up & I'm making some assumptions but here goes....

Your minidisc/CD playback device for the music/click should have an independant L/R output.
Take the L/R outputs & feed them into two input channels on your board. Now bring up the channel with the music on it so it's going through your PA speakers.
The click track channel fader should be left down so no sound is coming through the speakers.
Plug a set of headphones (for the drummer) into the Aux out (or monitor out)on your board.
Turn up the aux send (or monitor send) on the channel with the click on it - the drummer should now hear the click & only the music should be coming out of the speakers.
You may want to send some of the music to the drummers cans so he can hear it too.

I think this should work but maybe some other guys can think of a better/different way.

Scott

[mrufino1]

That's pretty much how you do it. We do some of this in church as well (we're the opposite- we have no keyboardists but have 2 guitars, bass (me), drums, and singers). We have been doing some David Crowder songs which use some tracks (he used Reason on the album and included the files on his CD) and some other things, will do more soon. But whatever we're using for tracks, be it minidisc, laptop, or sampler, we do it like the last post. L and R go out independently, PA gets only the right withthe music, drummer gets L and R in his monitor send. He uses headphones to monitor, using a headphone amp getting one of the aux busses. It works well, sounds full because the PA is mono anyway. If the PA is stereo, which is pretty rare, you can still use tracks, you need somethign with at least three outs, then send the drummer the backing track out 2 outputs, the click out another, and if you have a monitor mix, send that to the drummer as well. The drummer would need to have a small mixer and the lines would be physical lines to his mixer. It works though, I did it in a recording session so that only the drummer would get the click. Best of luck!

[SGPIANOMAN]

First off, Thank you brightside for figuring out my situation..i appreciate it.
mrufino1- do you think that the drummer only should hear the click, or should I? I didn't know if it would work better if just the drummer heard, and then i heard a kickoff from the drummer. The guy who told me about how he sets his tracks up was Doug Riley from Gold City Quartet. Thanks for the help

[ecktronic]

Dont bother with a click track as this looses all the energy of the song as you are imprissoned as a slave to the one tempo. When you play live you dont stick to one tempo so why do it. Editing might be a little bit harde but it still aint that hard to edit, and not much editing should really be needed if yous are competent players.

[SGPIANOMAN]

But that kinda defeats the purpose of playing to the backing track in the concert...