Suggestions for live backing tracks/tempo sync

[MonoksideC]

This is my first post, but I've been reading stuff here for as long as I can remember! This is going to be a bit long winded and maybe a little complicated, so sorry in advance for that.

We have a typical acoustic drum setup in our live shows, but our studio tracks have a lot of layered synthetic drum loops over the acoustic tracks as well as pretty extensive arpeggiated synth lines that are a pain for me to do live right now because I have to tap the tempo to keep things in sync.

I can't get my band to agree on the best way to go about playing these other elements live. Here's the setup that I'm experimenting with right now:

Drum triggers attached to a trigger->midi unit
-> Feeds into "Circular Logic InTime" for tempo sync
-> Clock sync out to Brainspawn Forte 2, which hosts my synths and effects.
-> Forte hosts EnergyXT2 which has a sequencer that can play back my midi sequences (drum loops mostly, and the occasional sample, such as the intro narration for our show)

Now, if I could just start the transport before every song, this would work, but here's the problem that I can't figure out the best way to reliably get around:
Many of our songs start with no pre-established tempo (as in, bass guitar intro, vocal intros, etc) with no drums.

For these songs, what I've been trying to do is tap the tempo on my Behringer FC1010 pedal (which InTime will use to override the detected tempo) but I need to manually trigger transport in EnergyXT to start at the *PERFECT* time for the backing tracks to start and be in sync with the drums.

This is very tricky to do, and a drum loop that is playing even ever so slightly out of time with a real drumset sounds like complete garbage. If this happens, theres no way to fix it other than stop the transport and leave it out for the entire song.

Anyone have any ideas for this? Our drummer is very against a click track in his ear (he has hearing damage in one ear) and the rest of the band isn't willing to do count offs, nor are they willing to modify any of the songs so that they can start with a known tempo.

If anyone has any suggestions or could share some similar experiences and how they were worked around, I would be very greatful! Thanks.

[Jens Siegfried]

I don't know about Brainspawn Forte 2, but if you for example use ableton live, inTime is able to start the sequenzer.
In our scenario, which is pretty much the same as yours, we tap the tempo on one trigger pad to prepare inTime and then use another to start inTime, which then starts ableton live. SLook for the extendend MIDI settings in inTime...
Hit pad one a couple of times, then the other pad on note one of your sequenzer arrangement, and of you go with everything and cream.
If there are some other no live drum parts in the song, our drummer again uses pad one to "manualy" and almost silently trigger inTime.
Does this help?