Preparing your songs for concert?

[Fornicras]

Hi all,

I want to ask something which has not been clear to me since I started making music.

I'm an R&B Singer who gave concerts to an audience of 1000+ people twice. All of my music is around synths and electronic drums so there is no band or live instruments, it's just me and my voice. In my concerts before I sang the song with the original song playing in the background with low-level vocals, it was almost like a playback but my live voice was much louder. I don't think it's a good way of having a concert from the listener standpoint.

Sometimes I see other artists just open the project file in Logic or whatever DAW they have and sing from there, I'm not exactly sure but I think it's the original recording project which has all of the plugins, midi data (or no midi data, just another session that has the beat and vocals in it), and sing from their vocal chain directly. I don't know if it's like this, if so I don't know how they handle the latency.

Another thing I just saw on Youtube from an unrelated video and caused me to open this topic.
While mixing, make 5 busses. For Instruments, Bass, Drums, Vocals, and Background Vocals and when you finished mixing/mastering, export those busses individually and when you need the concert version of the song you can just use the stems for Instruments, Bass, Drums and BG Vocals and export them without the lead vocals, so you will have everything but the lead vocal(s) in your concert.

Or just export your beat with no vocals in it?

How do you do it, what do you think is the "correct" way of doing it?

Thanks.

[BertKoor]

For some time I was the sound engineer of a small band: 3 singers and a guitar, all the other things came out of a midi player hooked up to a Roland JV-1080 and an Alesis drum machine. There were like 8 tracks for those automated instruments. They had bought midi files for popular songs and tweaked them a bit to their liking (mainly program changes)

For whatever reason they preferred me riding all those faders and switching reverb & delay effects.
To be honest they could have mixed it all down to just a stereo track and use a minidisc player or whatever

[Fornicras]

For some time I was the sound engineer of a small band: 3 singers and a guitar, all the other things came out of a midi player hooked up to a Roland JV-1080 and an Alesis drum machine. There were like 8 tracks for those automated instruments. They had bought midi files for popular songs and tweaked them a bit to their liking (mainly program changes)

For whatever reason they preferred me riding all those faders and switching reverb & delay effects.
To be honest they could have mixed it all down to just a stereo track and use a minidisc player or whatever

Thanks for your input.

I think I found my way for it;
Let's say I have 8 vocal tracks:
1 Lead
1 Dub (sang higher Octave)
3 Harmony/Dub - panned to left
3 Harmony/Dub - panned to right

I just turn off the lead vocal and export the song. Then I will sing the lead vocal in the concert.

I am still open to ideas if there's better way though.