Keep It Together
Individual tracks on his shows can be as low as the number of stems or into the hundreds, depending on the song or artist.
“Usually there are repetitive parts that the band doesn’t want to play, or specific sound effect cues that have to be exact,” McKnight says. “Obviously there are multiple click tracks for different members of the band so we keep it all together.
“Sometimes a tour will only have three background singers, and the artist will want to augment them with the studio background vocal tracks. I also will put any orchestral parts played on the record by live musicians into my system as well.”
He has been using backing tracks since acquiring his first Commodore 64 computer in 1985 or so. “I was playing in a bar band and we needed to sound ‘like the record,’ so a Commodore 64 with the SCI MIDI interface, Oberheim DX drum machine, and a MIDI keyboard/module or two did the trick,” McKnight says.
“My first ‘real’ playback gig was with Earth Wind & Fire in 1987 using Roland MC500s,” he continues, “and then the first big playback gig was Madonna in 1990 using an Atari 1040 with a pile of E-MU 8 MB samplers. That was a nightmare, and I had no backup system, but thankfully it worked.”
Broader Appeal
The playback system itself can be a computer or a dedicated playback recorder. Both tend to use hard disc recording as the storage medium although more and more solid state devices are now coming to market.
A big concern for the sound engineer, of course, is system failure at the most inopportune time. In the past, big budget tours would have a custom switcher made that would enable the technician to switch from the primary playback system to a backup should a problem occur.
The recent availability of more affordable off-the-shelf backing track switchers and multitrack recorders have brought the advantages of backing tracks to greater number of acts.
And with more and more computers finding their way on live stages, the backing track has never been more popular. Switching tracks can be done automatically or manually. Most experienced techs tend to prefer keeping everything manual. This way, should a computer fail, the second backing system will be totally independent and a simple push of a button will reroute the signal from one recorder to the other.
Peter Janis is the president of Radial Engineering and has worked in professional audio for more than 30 years.