Hi,

After a major disaster of a gig on Saturday, where the laptop - which was running a click to a Roland Electronic drum kit - decided to send dog barks and other nonsense instead of a cowbell to our drummer, I have finally convinced our keys player that it's not a safe option to use a laptop with MIDIfiles live.

Although he is happy to go along the CD route (probably because the drummer will thump him if he isn't), he's still concerned that it would have to be in mono with the click on the other track.

I know that some are in favour of mono mixes because it means that you give the same signal to the whole room, but I know that the top pro bands don't do it.

I've thought about creating a 5:1 surround sound mix in Cubase from the original MIDIfiles, where two stereo wav files go out as normal, but also the sub output takes the click. Unfortuntely, I don't know of anyone producing a 5:1 DVD player that is bombproof enough to use on the road.

Alternatively, I thought about using a four track hard disk recorder, but what is out there that will hold 90 minutes of stereo wav files and a click track?

A further alternative is to use a 5:1 surround sound external USB card with the laptop and go the 5:1 DVD route - ie create two tracks of WAVs and a third containing the click set to the sub out. The problem is that I've never seen anyone try this live and again there is a reliability issue.

I saw Evenescence last year and the keys were nearly all recorded and it was all clearly in stereo with the drummer getting the click. So what do the top pro bands use to do it all?

Regards

WAL

Alot of larger shows use a Hard Disc recorder with multiple tracks on it to playback.

A few shows I've done (I wont name the artists as I guess they don't want you to know that there is a track behind their live sets) they've given me a hard drive and I've taken my HD24 along or they've brought their own, or a similar device, it's had 8 or 10 tracks on it which I feed into channels. one of these is the click, which goes to a couple of sets of IEMS. The other tracks have various items on it, not limited to percussion, keyboard, orchestra, vocals, and other weird and wonderful things.

Most of them get put on stage and operated by the drummer or keyboard player (the units channel outputs are sent through a rack mounted DI box or 2) and me or the acts engineer mix in what channels are required at what level.

One particular show I was left to operate the unit myself, it's no more complicated than hitting play on a minidisc, but you have to remember to select the correct track. (no, I didn't forget, luckily)



additional.....you really don't want to know what my useless eyes thought the title said.

Our tribute band has been through a number of techniques:

1) Bring all the MIDI keys/samplers, etc., and play a MIDI file from the computer that runs my cue software (which does the lights as well as play back MIDI files). Using a MIDI track to play the click and cue sounds from one of the samplers.

It was a nightmare, with a whole rack of units, we had a few occasions where the patch memories decided to disappear

2) Using Cubase on a laptop to generate the MIDI to the keys, but this time use a VST instrument (we use the standard LM9 drum machine for the clicks). I replaced 4 of the less used instruments with samples of me saying '1', '2', '3' and '4' to generate extra cues.

Still a nightmare with the rack of units

3) Render stem mixes of our keyboards/sound effects, etc. to stereo pairs of audio, and run all that, along with the VSTi click/cue tracks.

This is what we still currently do, I use a MOTU828MkII, we run 4 independent clicks to various people, and use 3 stereo pairs of rendered audio, so FOH can still blend them together depending on the venue, etc.

So just a laptop, the MOTU and a bank of IEMs. It also generates a MIDI track we send to FOH for effect unit preset changing, and also feeds the lighting computer to move through the light cues for each song.

It works nicely.

Did consider an HD24-based route, but that doesn't allow a MIDI track. It might generate MMC which would be ok for the lighting, but not really for Fx unit program changes.

With the IEMs, we can mix the click level with a standard foldback from FOH to provide a mix for our ears.

Jason

Hi, I'm just planning a live band show & I'd like to do something similar I.e. stereo backing, click track for the drummer. But I'd also like to use midi to run the lighting controller, control the FX on my Line 6 Pod and possibly various other midi things.

I can see that this is fairly straight forward to do with a laptop with multiple audio outputs & midi out. But I have two questions....

1. It sounds like this may be prone to failure (ok not dog barks & whistles for the drummer in my case) but I've never tried this out yet...is it likely to be a problem? This wouldn't be such a problem with the lighting (merely an inconvenience), but could be pretty bad with the guitar & other FX.

2. At home I use cubase as my sequencer & whilst its pretty easy to do what I want with this, I can imagine its pretty cumbersome in a live enviroment (having to load up different files and things between songs). So is there any better software for this type of job, or is there an affordable hardware solution that I don't know about (I have a farily limited knowledge about these things).

In addition to the above, I'd like to be able to drop in various other tracks on other channels, for example if the bass player couldn't make a gig - add in the bass track.... but not have to have it mixed in with the main stereo backing.

Any ideas welcome!

1. There's always a risk of laptops on stage. Less so these days though. From experience, I would say, never skimp on the quality of any firewire or USB cables and connectors you use. We've had issues with our sony vaio with the MOTU and a Lacie HDD. Some would often drop out when hanging off the same bus, even with a hub in there. So now we use a Belkin PCMCIA cardbus adapter which provides 3 independent busses. Problem solved.

We don't run the guitar FX from the computer setup. If something does go awry, we at least have manual control. The FOH guy can quickly re-select a 'safe' vocal FX patch if needed too.

2. Our songs are very long, so the file loading thing isn't that much of a problem. To speed it up further, we create 'LIVE' versions of our song files, removing all audio from the pool except the rendered stuff. Loading hundreds of muted tracks and plugins does eat time pretty well. If you're using the newer cubase's, you might like to experiment with loading all the songs, and just 'activating' the one you want to play.

You might want to look at Ableton Live as an alternative.

And on your final point, we have muted audio pairs for just the situation you mention. We actually have the drums muted, so we can use the live songs for rehearsals when setting up our enormo-kit is not convenient. Just route them to spare audio outputs as required.

Hope this helps,

Jason

In all honesty I only ever use a click track when in a studio.
Come to think of it I have been recording today and used the track for about 10 minutes.
When live I much prefer a mix in my IEM which has more vocals and bass in it and then guitars and other instruments.

My 2p's worth

I use Sonar 6, into a Korg Triton, for drums, and various other sounds....And Midi channel 15 also controls the lighting rig.

Edit to add....

All done by midi.

As I've bored people with far to often in here, in my experience a computer, loaded only with a reliable OS like XP and the software needed to record, edit and playback sound, tends to be more reliable than any CD or DVD player I've owned.

For basic 4 or 5 channel playback you don't need a particularly high spec computer and 90 minutes of CD quality stereo sound is a bit under 1 gig of disk space--say 2 gig if you have 2 channels of click track as well--so you don't need a huge hard drive either.

I'd just get a good basic spec computer, a decent 4 channel sound card and something like SCS for playback. I'd trust that rather more than a 5.1 coded DVD.

Bob

What are your feelings on running midi reliably through such a system. Also what is SCS (I'm new here).

Regards

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Is that because you've never felt the need to or because you don't trust it to? I love the control I can get over a relatively simple Line 6 pod 2.0, via midi in the studio, the parameters are for more accessible via midi than via the floorboard, but I'm nervous about trying it out live.

If I have the floorboard in front of me for backup, that would be much like the FOH man being on hand to select a safe vocal patch, except with me and my feet!?

Thoughts anyone?

depends what you need.. I work with a lot of bands where the drummer has an electric metronome on stage. The metronome creates the click. I just di the output and feed it into the bands ears..

SCS is Sound Cue System, a piece of software which does pretty much what it says on the tin! We run all our playback off it (professional theatre company) and last summer used it for backing tracks on a musical for the first time. We ran three-track WAV files (stereo backing tracks and the third track was the click, being sent to the conductor's IEMs) and it worked perfectly all summer. I can't answer for running MIDI on it, because we haven't tried that, but I think it supports it. We run it on XP, on a dedicated computer (which has had everything extraneous removed from it!) running out of a Firewire port into an M-Audio box which has 8 outputs. It's stable, reliable and easy to use.

The mistake was using the MIDI click - why not - if your sequencer can do it use an audio track for the click - then all your MIDI tracks will play on their sound sources, and the laptop audio will have the click?

Great, that looks like a nice piece of software, and reasonably priced too! Will definitely check it out! Oh, and it does seem to support midi!

Thanks

I'm sure it's been said before but I can't be bothered to trawl through all the responses-HD24 has always been bullet proof in this situation for me and gives you a whole 23 tracks of orchestration you can add on top of the click! Good practice to transport the two hard drives separately I.e. don't leave them both in the HD24 as one drop and you've lost your primary and your back up.

HTH

Jim

I'm guessing this was Cubase you were using on stage? I'd never use Cubase on stage, I've found it to be far too unreliable, especially when it comes to the metronome and sometimes just not working or other times using the wrong MIDI channel without me telling it to etc...

Switched to Logic Pro and I've never looked back, there's no more fuffing about with small, unreliable utilities. Far more reliable, and I have used it on stage for drum sequencing, click tracks through headphones and processing sound through a multiple-input interface, all at the same time. It's never given me any issues.

A bit unfair? PC users don't find Cubase unreliable - certainly not in my experience, and Mac people are happy with Logic - Just a Ford v Vauxhall choice really, isn't it?

We weren't using Cubase live (although the tracks were modified and arranged in Cubase). Can't remember what was being used, but I suspect that between songs, a MIDI reset message wasn't being sent between the sequencer, the MIDI module and the brain of the drum kit - hence the barking dogs etc on the click track! However, that isn't really a concern - the set up has proved unreliable and won't see use again.

I fancy the hard disk route and I know that something like an Alesis HR24 will do the job (and they aren't ludicrously expensive), but taking a 24 track player out just to play back two stereo wav files and a click seems overkill. Is there a small 4 track recorder out there that will hold the 90 minutes of three track audio at full resolution that we need, with a big red "on" and "off" switch to avoid confusion?

Regards

WAL

Surely the main problem with MIDI is that the protocol contains no (or little) error correction? In my experience, which is only in a studio environment, messages sometimes get lost - this in itself can lead to all sorts of problems!