Hi Everyone,
I have been recording at home for many years. I now want to play my music live. I play solo electric guitar. I don’t have a band. I believe the Arranger Track is the best tool for setting up a setlist. My question(s) is this:
For each song, should I do Audio Mixdown to that song (minus the guitar) to a Wave file and import that to my setlist project or is there a better way? (The setlist project will contain all the songs in the set.)
I also need some advice on the most efficient way to setup hardware on stage. All advice is welcome.
In theory it’s enough to have a stereo mixdown minus the live parts.
In practice it’s more flexible to use multiple stems for playback. That way you can adjust volumes independently to suit the situation. Live venues & PA systems react different than your studio monitor speakers, there’s much more sound interaction, the static playback parts are less dynamic than your live performance etc. Good to have options, but they are only useful if you have enough soundcheck time.
If it’s a one-man show without sound engineer, keep it easy. If there is a sound engineer and you use a multi output interface think about offering multiple signals (stereo stems). Then the mix part is on the engineers’ side & more flexible.
Whatever signals you offer, be sure you get them all out to XLR or use/ask for DI boxes.
Thanks for marQs for your reply, I am new to all of this and would appreciate some pointers as to how to setup multiple stems for playback. Do I understand correctly that each of the instruments in the backing track will be individually adjustable? How is this done? Thanks you for your assistance.
The band I’m using playback/sample tracks for is like this: we have drums, bass, guitar, vocals live. Then there are certain things that can’t be played by an instrument, sounddesign elements, reversed stuff, special fx etc.
The songs are finished album productions. So I opened the projects, took out anything we play live. The ‘complement’ of the the songs remains and consists of different things described above (different from song to song). Instead of bouncing that all toghether to a simple stereo playback, I sorted it into groups (stems) and exported them individually. Without question this can be time consuming.
The result is a bunch of musically sorted backing tracks that - played at unity gain (0 db on their channels’ fader) - sums up pretty exactly to what it is on the album production minus the live elements. I have a little bit more control now of how loud the different elements need to be for a live situation.
Compared to an album production, where everything is well controllable, live performing has completely differrent dynamics. Here we’re dealing with many more factors - venue size, local PA system, musicians’ mood-of-the-day etc. The multi-stem playback allows to adjust accordingly. I primarily do it via event gains (leaving all channel faders at unity). My live Cubase project sums that to a stereo output, feeding the live mixer - to keep it as simple as possible on that side.
There’s a click track of course, an additional ‘signal’ track, a ‘tuning’ track (some songs begin with vocals, singer needs a note to be spot on). For navigating through the show I use the marker track and the short cuts ‘next’ and ‘previous’.
To get an idea, here’s a video. Just mute anything your brain can identify as drums/bass/guitar/lead vocals to know what’s playing out of Cubase
