KVR Audio

tombikadam · Post by **tombikadam** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 12:09 am

İmagine your self playing to a singer and she wants only 1 musician, so without buying an arranger keyboard, what is the best hard/software combination in stage to play live?

an-electric-heart · Post by **an-electric-heart** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 12:15 am

Just mime. Have a keyboard and a laptop and pretend you're doing stuff. If it's a pop act and it's all about the singer it doesn't matter, that's what they all do, the music is just a backing track and "the band" is for show.

Gymnopedies · Post by **Gymnopedies** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 1:07 am

Ableton Live and a clip launcher pad thingy.

rockstar_not · Post by **rockstar_not** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 2:37 am

Depends. Band In A Box software will allow you to enter the chord progression and style and you get a pretty usable arrangement out of it. Ableton will let you play more live with loops. What kind of music are you planning on doing?

thecontrolcentre · Post by **thecontrolcentre** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 3:02 am

Ableton Live & PUSH2

... or an Elektron Octatrack

tombikadam · Post by **tombikadam** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 7:57 am

pop and pop+house mixture

skipscada · Post by **skipscada** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:16 am

If you can actually play keyboard, just pre-record/program rhythm/bass tracks and play keyboard parts live.

An alternative approach is to use a looper of some sort. Could be a fun variation for at least a small part of your live set.

someone called simon · Tue Oct 17, 2017 8:32 am

Plenty of people (like me!) play one instrument to back a singer. Guitar or Piano work best usually. No loops or or pre recording needed. That seems the most obvious thing. So either the singer wants more, or the skill level isn't sufficient?

morelia · Post by **morelia** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:07 am

Just the two of us. I create the backing tracks (programmed drums, bass, guitars, synths, rubbish bin etc) and leave one guitar part out. Live, I play guitar and sing harmonies and the vocalist sing (in time and key if I'm really lucky) and deal with comments from clueless punters like wow, your really talented.

Oh, probably more relevant to your issue, I think you need an iPod and a keyboard to fake play or really play one part. If it were me I'd pick the coolest part of any song and leave that out of the backing mix to play live.

K-Bee · Post by **K-Bee** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:19 am

skipscada wrote:If you can actually play keyboard, just pre-record/program rhythm/bass tracks and play keyboard parts live.

I attended an Eric Benét (soul singer) concert a few years back and basically it was just him and a keyboard player doing just that. I suppose it worked to great extent for the majority of the audience (the reactions gave that away). Still, as a jazz listener, it just seems wrong for me personally, but I can understand why they do it

tapper mike · Post by **tapper mike** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 7:37 pm

Tuck Andress approach before his wife decided to stop singing..... All off of one guitar.

Last summer I started busking again after too many years hiatus of live performance. It was mostly fingerstyle (chord melody) jazz standards and the occasional vocal and guitar for pop/rock.

BIAB is great for jazz but it's not great for everything else... here's why. Pop, country, rock your audience is expecting "off the record" type of performance. You'd be better off using professional backing tracks or midi. Midi covers are a dying art. It's not like 10 or 20 years ago where you could find everything by everyone everywhere.

Guitar Pro My Song Book and gprotabs on the other hand has a much more active community of scorers. It will sound much closer to the original score than biab

an-electric-heart · Post by **an-electric-heart** » Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:34 pm

I sing and play guitar, the rest is just a backing track... but I pretend I'm doing things... nobody knows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQcZDhjChjc

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Wed Oct 18, 2017 2:09 am

For live gigging, if one can get a 2 track mix "balanced enough" so that you basically have three audio sources to mix live, and it mixes well-- 1. Vocal | 2. A live instrument, keys, guitar, whatever | 3. Everything else.

If the "everything else" stereo mix generally includes bass, drums, other incidental backing tracks, then it might be a challenge to get the "everything else" part mixed well enough so that it is neither too bottom-heavy, mid-heavy, or top-heavy after adding-in the vocals and live instrument.

A possible way to overcome that, would be to simply multi-track record every song yer gonna do live, including vocals and live instrument. Make a "low budget album quality" mix of everything. Then mute the vocal and live instrument, leave all the other track levels and EQ the same, and mix the "everything else" sans vocal and live instrument. In theory if you put those sub-mixes on an MP3 player or computer playlist player, Foobar 2000 or whatever-- Set a "standard playback level" of the backing mixes into the sound system and then it shouldn't be incredibly difficult to turn up the live instrument and the vocal "just enough" to get the live mix "in the ballpark" as well-balanced as your original studio recording of everything including vocals and live instrument.

There might be more wiggle-room to fix home-studio mixing mistakes if the backing tracks are multi-track stems, not just a stereo pair of everything. Maybe a drums/perc stem, a bass stem, strings/horns stem, whatever. Thataway even if the preparatory home-mixing has some problems, or just doesn't sound properly balanced on some sound systems or performance rooms, you might be able to trim everything into a decent mix live.

I personally think that is way too much hassle and complexity. IMO it would be better to try to get "adequately good" at properly mixed backing tracks that will sit well with whatever you are prepared to whip out live on-top of the backing tracks. You would need to play back multi-track stems from a sequencer/daw rather than a simple stereo audio file player. Might need a sound man to benefit from more that a left-right well mixed stereo pair of backing track. If you are busy trying to tweak drums and bass levels for the room along with playing your axe and also maybe projecting at least a little bit of stage personality, it would be too many things for one person to do well, and trainwrecks on-stage are quite embarrassing.

IMO there is little or no advantage of hardware or software synths computer-controlled to create the backing sound "fresh" on-stage every time you play the song. That would be more complicated with many more things that can go wrong, compared to having all your tracks as stereo WAV or 320 kbps MP3 on an iPod or on-stage laptop.

JCJR · Post by **JCJR** » Wed Oct 18, 2017 2:51 am

I've only done a few sequenced gigs over the years, and they were usually well-prepared single sets, not multi-set gigs with enough repertoire depth to play the same room many consecutive nights without quickly getting stale for repeat customers.

OTOH I suppose a lot of gigs, "concert warm up" or even feature acts, might only play a dozen songs per night and never the same place twice. I never did that much. Nice work if you can get it I suppose.

I did some years of "keyboards + female singer" before sequencing was possible. Also a few years "keyboards + drummer + singer". And of course just solo keyboards, sometimes croaking out vocals before realizing I'd never be a singer.

My favorite is probably trio + vocalists if none of the musicians are singers. Got no objection to bigger bands, but it is pretty easy to sound "pretty fat" with three musicians. Sometimes with bigger bands there are too many grumbles, gossipping, musical disagreements, too much time spent rehearsing even with good musicians, though bigger bands can make a bigger sound. With a trio you can't afford to get too fancy about it (unless you are Oscar Peterson or whatever). Keep it simple stupid.

I enjoyed playing keys and playing keybass on about half the songs, and the guitarist playing bass on the other half of the songs. Keys/Bass/Drums about half the time and Keys/Keybass/Guitar/Drums the other half of the time. That is enough folks on-stage you can play "a decent enough version" of maybe at least 80 or 90 percent of "old fashioned" repertoire without bothering to sequence anything at all. I don't mind playing keybass all night but drummers can get resentful if they never get to play along with somebody devoting their entire brain to bass rather than just the right-half of a brain to bass.

It is easy to get hung up on the superstition that the music has to be 100 percent as fat possible, 100 percent of the time. Perhaps caused by a musician's insecurity. I mean, nylon string guitar ALL BY ITSELF is fat if played right. Solo piano is fat if played right. It doesn't even have to be played fancy with lots of fast notes and fireworks, just played right. Add a vocal atop ac guitar or piano, it is even more gooder.

Back in the early 1970's was doing keyboards + girl vocalist lounge gigs. Playing keybass, piano, organ, synth, with the Cheezmaster 2000 drum box. ALL..NIGHT..ON..EVERY..SONG.. Good guitarist friend came by to listen. He said, "Your sets are boring because you are trying to fill every hole in every song. Every song is as fat as you can make it front to back. It would be less boring if you would do some of the songs with just piano, without the organ, keybass or Cheezmaster 2000 drum box. Then maybe do some of the songs with just the drum box and bass. Change it up so some songs are fat and some songs are thin."

I was too hung up and insecure to believe him at the time, but he was 100 percent correct. There is such as thing as trying too hard.

K-Bee · Post by **K-Bee** » Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:55 am

tapper mike wrote:Tuck Andress approach before his wife decided to stop singing..... All off of one guitar.

She stopped singing?

That's a damn shame. I have their 3 first LPs and really love their approach. Andress is an amazing player, slightly reminding me of Stanley Jordan with the fretboard technique. I just realized that Andress has done some stuff on hos own as well. I'll have to investigate further into that

One man band advice