[00:00:00] James: Welcome to episode 199 of the Bandhive Podcast.

[00:00:05] James: It is time for the final episode in the 100s of the Bandhive Podcast. My name is James Cross and I help independent artists tour smart. this week we're gonna be talking about embracing technology in your live shows. Now, back in the day, bands played a hundred percent live. And there was just no other way around it.

[00:00:26] James: If you wanted to have piano strings, whatever you had to take those musicians on the road with you or hire locals who pretty expensive to play those instruments and learn your set for one or two shows. These days we can do that without having. a massive budget. Back in probably around the 80s or 90s, we started to see acts that were just playing to a tape, which is not at all what I'm suggesting here.

[00:00:54] James: That is not what anyone should ever do. Just miming your entire set to a recording is [00:01:00] ridiculous and pointless. It's not live music at that point. That's just, playing Spotify. Don't do that. But we've seen artists more and more incorporating extra elements that they wouldn't be able to into their live set.

[00:01:11] James: A great example of this is AFI's song Death of Seasons. There are so many electronic elements in that song that they honestly would not be able to pull it off if they didn't have backing tracks or samples in their set. Now, these days, they do it entirely with samples. They don't use tracks, which is Incredibly impressive considering what goes into that song.

[00:01:35] James: They don't play it to a click, they just have some samples. And they do it really well for the most part, Unless it's the drum tech messing up like he did at the 20th anniversary Sing the Sorrow Show. That was a little embarrassing.

[00:01:45] James: It's possible to do this without playing to a click. Now, I'm a huge fan of playing to a click for a lot of reasons, but if you don't want to, you don't have to, and you can still incorporate these modern elements of technology into your set, at least to an [00:02:00] extent. but aside from using samples or backing tracks, you can also do incredible things with lighting.

[00:02:05] James: And syncing your whole show to your performance, which just takes you to the next level. And typically in the old days, you needed to hire a crew for this. You needed to hire a lighting designer and operator who would go on the road with you and run your lights.

[00:02:20] James: Now you can just program your set and have the majority of it done for you. Now that's not going to say you're not going to need to make some changes or have somebody along for lights if you're playing bigger stages, in which case you definitely will. But for smaller stages, you can bring in your own rig and set it up pretty easily as long as it's synced to your set, which is the way to go, really.

[00:02:40] James: not only that you can also incorporate video or other effects into your set now, this all comes with some technological challenges though the first being that you're going to want to have in ear monitors. There's just no real way to play to a click without in ears.

[00:02:56] James: If you don't have in ears, you can't do that, which brings [00:03:00] its own challenges. If you're carrying in ears, you need to have wireless transmitters, which we'll talk about later. If you have wireless transmitters and in ears, you're probably going to need to have your own monitor board, which can be something as simple as a digital rack mount unit.

[00:03:11] James: That's totally fine. But then you're going to need a split for the snake so you can send signal to front of house. You're also going to need to send from house the signal from your computer so they can actually send out any backing tracks that you have or any samples that you have. There's a lot that goes into this that's kind of what we're going to talk about today But I invite you to head on over to the Bandhive community by heading over to Facebook and searching for Bandhive. That's B A N D H I V E Or going to Bandhive. rocks slash group to automatically be redirected to our Facebook community

[00:03:44] James: Now, I already talked about one real world example, which is AFI. Another one that I like to talk about is New Politics. They do not have a bass player. they have a lot of synths, and they have a lot of bass. But they do not have a bass player. They have two singers, one of whom plays guitar, and a drummer.

[00:03:59] James: And [00:04:00] that's it. They are a three piece, without a bass. Magically, you hear bass at all their shows, and you hear synths at all their shows. That is because they play to tracks. And you know what? They have one of the most fun live shows I've ever seen. It's incredible. And yeah, you know what? So a big portion of their show comes to the tracks, but a big portion of it doesn't.

[00:04:20] James: And it is just a fun show, and they are still 100% performing the instruments that you see them playing. that's the point. They play those instruments, and then something else, a computer, brings in the parts that are too cost prohibitive for them to add. most bands, yeah, they would have a bass player.

[00:04:37] James: All kinds of other sounds, if you wanted all those other sounds, you'd need to then hire a keyboardist, or an orchestra. And they don't need to do that, because they have backing tracks. Similarly, pretty much every major artist out there uses samples or backing tracks at least some of the time because they're going to have elements of their songs that they want to reproduce in a live setting, but they can't do that in[00:05:00] a financially feasible manner without using backtracks.

[00:05:03] James: What it really comes down to when you're using backtracks is that you need to Keep the human element in your show while still having that added effect of, Hey, we sound huge because we have all of these tracks. So you want to be sure that you're really playing up your performance on stage.

[00:05:20] James: You look like you're having a blast and you're distracting people, not necessarily from something bad, but you want to keep the focus on you so all of the backtracked elements and the samples blend into the distance. like I said, you can do this by just having fun on stage. Of course, you can ask the engineer to keep the tracked elements relatively low in the mix.

[00:05:40] James: They should be there to add to your performance, not to overshadow your performance. I've seen a lot of engineers do this wrong, where the tracks are really high in the mix and guitars are really low. That's not what you want. You want the live instruments to be clearly audible and then the tracks are just supporting it, whether it's bass or synths or something entirely different.[00:06:00] [00:06:00] James: You want that to be riding below the main mix or at worst equal to that main mix. Now, when it comes to tools, my favorite setup, at least as of right now, is a MacBook pro, an X 32 rack, Sennheiser G4 in ears, and then a Behringer, I believe it's the MS 8, 000 split. These will all be linked in the show notes at Bandhive.

[00:06:20] James: rocks slash one nine nine. That's the number one hundred ninety nine. And you can go check out these tools for yourself. Now what you run those tracks with is up to you. You can use Ableton. You can use QLab. You can use Logic. You could even use Pro Tools. I know bands who do that.

[00:06:36] James: I'm a Pro Tools user myself. I wouldn't. I prefer QLab. Ableton is also good, and Pro Tools, it does work. When it comes to outputs, you can send as many outputs to Front of House as you want, as long as they are physically capable of handling those inputs. However, if you overwhelm the engineer, they're not going to be happy.

[00:06:54] James: So, I recommend doing no more than two to three, or just bussing it all down to one [00:07:00] output that you can feed to Front of House. You do not want your click track or any cues. To be in that feed, you do not ever want those to go to front of house, what we do in MyBandNerves is we actually have it isolated so that that signal will never go to front of house unless something is patched incorrectly on our end.

[00:07:18] James: So front of house literally cannot mess it up and accidentally put our click or cues into the mix unless we've messed something up on our end. So we're kind of foolproofing ourselves there, so we're sure that it will never happen. The reason I like QLab more than Ableton is that it's a little easier to learn.

[00:07:37] James: It's still incredibly complex, you can use audio, you can do lighting, and you can do video. It's really good, but it's actually made more for theater performances than Ableton, which is made for live performances. And yes, theater performances are live. But, because of QLab's structure for theater performances, this means you can do a lot more with it than you actually can in Ableton.

[00:07:59] James: Now it does [00:08:00] have some quirks. For example, if you're programming lights, you can't do it to a grid like you can in Ableton. So in QLab, it's all time based because again, it's made for theater performances. With that being time based, you have to figure out what the time is between your cues, which is relatively easy.

[00:08:17] James: If you know the BPM, you can figure it out. Okay. Four beats, one bar is going to be this amount of time. And then that's how long we program. This to run for or whatever time you want, whether it's two beats, one beat four beats, you can figure it out. It's all basic math at that point, the reason I recommend the X 32 rack for your monitor mixer is that it's pretty compact. You can fit it into a three new case, and it's really well known. A lot of people use the X32. There's other digital boards that might be theoretically better, but the X32 ecosystem is so widespread that if you ever have issues, you're probably going to have somebody in the venue who knows [00:09:00] the X32 system and can help you out with it.

[00:09:02] James: And that is a massive advantage. Not only that, if the venue is also running an x32, you can in fact, Just send them a digital snake, rather than having to patch into their analog snake. And this will make it much easier for everybody. One word of caution though, is you don't want them to mess with your game control if you do this.

[00:09:20] James: So be sure that you're only sending them a digital snake, locks them out of the game controls. Because otherwise, if they change those games, You're in your mix is going to change and that's not what you want. As for the Sennheiser G4, it's a pretty standard in ear system for twerking acts, so this is why I recommend it.

[00:09:36] James: And it also happens to be what we use for nerves. I really like it, it sounds good. And then I have Shure, I believe it's SE215 in ears, just the basic 100 Shures. And I'm perfectly happy with them. I've tried some others and they weren't for me.

[00:09:51] James: The Shure SE215s are where it's at. Someday maybe I'll get customs. I had custom earplugs for over 12 years now and I do [00:10:00] love them. But for the price point, 100 versus like 700 or 800 minimum, I'm totally fine with generics for now. So again, you can use Ableton, QLab, Pro Tools, whatever you want. Then an X32 rack, Sennheiser G4, and again, for the splitter, I would recommend the Behringer model.

[00:10:16] James: I believe it's the MS8000, cause mic split, and then 8000 for 8 channels, I guess. and that's a fairly good starting point for your in ear system. That's really all you need, and if you find yourself needing more, then maybe your band is doing a little too much for smaller venues. In which case, feel free to hit me up and we can talk about what you want to do with your band.

[00:10:41] James: So you can get booked at larger venues who can actually handle your production needs, or maybe we can thin out your production needs. Maybe you just have a little bit of overkill there and don't need everything that you think you need, Because I do see that in a lot of artists that they say, Oh, we need this and this and this. Just like, hold on, you could do this with a two channel [00:11:00] interface and VLC the video player. If you absolutely wanted to just have Click and cues on the left, monotracks on the right, and that's all you need to do.

[00:11:10] James: You can totally do that if it comes down to it. I'm not saying that's the ideal route to go, but if you want to do that super low budget, you can do that, and then use any two channel interface to get your signal to your monitors in front of house. But again, I'm not necessarily suggesting this. It's just an option.

[00:11:29] James: Now, there are great communities online where you can learn more about this topic. The first one, I already mentioned it, is the Bandhive Facebook community. You can join us by going to Bandhive. rocks slash group or searching for Bandhive on Facebook.

[00:11:42] James: The second one is Reddit. It has a bunch of people who are knowledgeable if you go to slash r slash livesound. That is a great community for people to learn from one another and ask questions as well. So, Bandhive and Reddit, both great resources for that, And I hope that we'll see you in the community soon so we can [00:12:00] talk about backtracking in your monitors and Sampling for your live sets that does it for this episode of the band hive podcast Thank you so much for tuning in and listening I really appreciate it and I hope that this episode has inspired you to consider Taking your band to the next level by using backing tracks samples or other Technology because it can be so incredibly efficient to have lighting, have backtracking, all of that stuff in your band rather than becoming a 10 piece ska band.

[00:12:29] James: You don't need that many people in your band. unless you have the budget for a bunch more people. You can use tracks I highly recommend it and oftentimes you're not adding a lot but that little bit you do add is going to be the difference between somebody getting hooked on your music and somebody saying Yeah, that's fine.

[00:12:46] James: They were okay, but not my cup of tea. So please join us in the band hive community on Facebook and let's chat again. That is Bandhive. rocks slash group or searching for Bandhive on Facebook. We'll be back with another brand new episode next Tuesday at 6 a. m.

[00:12:59] James: Eastern [00:13:00] time, right here in your favorite podcast app. Until then, I hope you have a great week. Stay safe. And of course, as always. Keep rockin