I’ve always been a bit suspicious of people playing to backing tracks. To me they are about buskers playing the tune to pop songs in the street with a karaoke track blaring out of a battery-powered amplifier. It’s a bit of a problem when you play a non-polyphonic instrument though. On a violin you can get, at most, 2 notes at a time and it’s not really the same as accompaniment – unless you’re the virtuoso-type who can play the Bach solo sonatas or partitas – which I can’t.
When I first started using loopers I was really keen to exploit the ability to record the accompaniment live so that everything the audience heard from the speakers was played in front of them, and not pre-prepared in the studio. That felt to me like a real move forward in the ‘live’ experience, and it’s great for improvisation of course.
But I also like to play the pieces I have composed and released on albums, and most of those have instruments other than a violin on them – so almost forcing me to use some pre-recorded tracks. (though I did once play guitar for an online gig to set up a backing track … something I hope everyone who saw it has erased from their memory!). My ways around this feel like a bit of a cop-out to be honest. For the “Quahog Stalker” I had the guitar samples triggered by individual pedals on a MIDI pedalboard, so it felt like I was playing them. When I got to “Ada Live” the number of samples was so large and complex that I settled for a ‘next’ button on the same pedalboard and used the other buttons for spacialisation effects in the Soundspiral.
Of course, those are ‘backing tracks’ in all but name. The last two solo gigs I did actually used full-length backing tracks for the pieces I played. I pressed ‘Play’ before I started and they ran until the end. This wasn’t a decision that came easily to me. Two of those pieces I justified to myself with the argument that the tracks were very much ‘backing’ – they were editted field-recordings that were designed to merely burble along in the background and give some context to what I was doing with the violin and loopers. ‘Deception‘ was the one that bothered me most though.
I wanted to play a track off my album – not that I have a fan base that want to heard recorded songs, it just felt like a good thing to do. On the album, Deception is about 60/40 synths to octave acoustic violin. Live I managed to replace some of the synth melody lines with violin but there was still quite a lot of synth going on. Rather than stand around looking lost, I concocted some violin bits to go in the spaces too – otherwise it risks looking like a semi-acousmatic work! Listening back to the recording and judging by the audience reaction I think that, musically, it worked.
So how much of a live show should be actually live? I’m pretty sure that more than 50% of Deception live was violin – and the bass synth was played live with footpedals. Does that mean I’m in the clear? I’m not sure if the audience care about this, I suspect not, but it still bothers me. Is there a minimum proportion of live to pre-recorded music?
No, of course not, but I still aim to reduce the recorded amount to a minimum. I’m working on my keyboard skills as part of CSMA and while I’ll never be a Rick Wakeman I can see the day when I do a solo synth set with no violin. Much as I love my violins (and I still have more of them than I have synthesizers), they are difficult to mix with other instruments when you’re playing solo. They keep both your hands busy!
The other option is to write album tracks that can be played live – something that we do with Helicopter Quartet. If the trend of me getting more solo gigs continues I think I might pursue this option. I still feel uncomfortable about ‘backing tracks’.
In case you missed it, here is one of those live tracks.
This is an eternal debate, and one that gets lost in a mess of questions about artistic integrity instead of the more useful discussion about how an audience relates to your performance… And there’s no such thing as ‘an audience’ as a monolithic thing. I’ve been to gigs I thought were awful that everyone else thought were great, and vice versa. There’s usually a spectrum of response. Some people don’t like backing tracks because they’ve decided – quite apart from the experience of the music – that they are ‘wrong’. Others just find a performance with as much predictable material as you get with a full backing track just doesn’t give them the surprise they’re looking for in a live gig. The latter makes a little more sense than the former, but for a lot of people, if they don’t know, there’s nothing in the experience that’s lacking, it’s their knowledge of the process that prevents them from properly engaging with the experience in the venue…
For the performer though, tracks are a limiting factor in the same way that playing just solo is a limiting factor. It has affordances for certain kinds of things, and it makes other things really tricky. Changing tempo to fit the context can be hard if you have audio samples rather than midi that you can tap-tempo… But you can do much broader sonic things with tracks… I think for me to use tracks, the context would have to be way more theatrical. It’d be tricky to be as intimate and risky as my solo gigs are if i was using tracks, but they would make certain kinds of spectacle way easier/more engaging… I’d make the stopping/starting/interacting with the tracks a performative rather than a purely functional element (I’m reminded of when Duke Special used to travel with a DAT player, but had it hidden behind an old wind up gramaphone that he’d use as a prop to make it look like he’d cut his tracks to vinyl 😉 )
So, forget integrity – think about affordance, performance and experience. Work out what it makes possible and explore that 😉 x
I think the issue with backing tracks has always been about disclosure and with electro-acoustic performances people are always aware that loops are part of the performance.
One reason, I forgot to mention, for using triggered samples in ‘Ada’ in particular was so I wasn’t tied down to a hard timeline. I don’t usually play to a pulse so I like to have the freedom to take things at my own pace. For ‘Enclosures’ (above) I used the Timeline in Ableton as a moving graphic score 🙂
That’s a good point Linda. it does seem to depend on genre. Of course there are concerts of totally acousmatic music where the ‘performer’ presses “play” and stands back – or maybe diffuses it over multiple speakers. So there is obviously a continuum here.
Personally I still prefer as much as possible to be ‘live’, but it does limit the range of the music you can perform if you only have a single instrument. Which I think is my excuse 🙂
[…] of the things I didn’t do on this album, that I mentioned in my blog post on backing tracks, is to make music that is playable live. With the notable exception of Enclosures, which was […]