As you know Pat, I mix all my backing tracks at home in a DAW, save as a WAV file, compress as a high quality mp3 file, and use a laptop on stage.

  1. Finished songs vs BiaB: Although BiaB plays the track differently every time it has a lot of ragged endings and if you can't add song specific licks to a BiaB track very easily
  2. WAV or mp3 files vs live synth tracks: With WAV or mp3 files there is less to go wrong on the gig. Two computers loaded with your audio files and your gig is fail-safe.
  3. Laptop vs tablet or iPod type player: With a laptop, the keyboard is always present so calling up the next song on the spur of the moment is instant. Type a couple or few letters, hit enter and the song starts. If the dance floor is full and I need another fast one, a 5 second delay between songs is too long. With the keyboard always present, I can go to the next song instantly.
  4. MP3 vs WAV files: I back up my almost 600 backing tracks to the cloud. 192mbps mp3 files take about 10 minutes to upload, WAV take forever. Plus they take up much less room than WAV files in the cloud. But the cloud is an off-site backup. There is a lot of work in my backing tracks, if a fire, tsunami, tornado or whatever happens at my home, all my work won't be lost.


Many years ago, I used to feed sequences on the gig into a rack of hardware synths. This worked fine until one of the synths failed on the gig. Software synths can crash too. Fortunately as long as I didn't touch the rack of synths, the synth would work, if it got jarred it would boot up again, reading samples from a floppy disk.

That's when I went computer with mp3 files on a laptop. Since 2002 I've had 2 computer failures and I gig for a living. In both cases I switched the USB->AUDIO interface to the always up and running spare computer and continued the gig without a glitch.

There is more than one right way to do this, and since gigging as a duo with my own generated backing tracks since 1985, this is the way that works best for me.

More details on how I make the tracks and use them on stage can be accessed here:
http://www.nortonmusic.com/backing_tracks.html

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks