How to Use Pre-Recorded Backing Tracks Live 1/3

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
This time we will talk about LIVE music, and how to integrate pre-recorded music (like orchestral parts, or backing vocals) with a real band, making sure everything is on time.

There are actually 2 methods, today we will see the easiest one, which does not involve the use of a computer, but lets us only have backing tracks in mono.

what we need is:

- an Mp3 Player (or a smartphone put in airplane mode) with the backing tracks inside

- a Y stereo minijack cable (a cable that takes the stereo sound from the mp3 player and splits it into 2 mono sounds, one with the left track and one with the right track).

- 2 adaptors from minijack to normal jack, to connect the aforementioned cable to the mixer

- a mixer, with at least 2 channels, as the one depicted on the first photo

- one jack with a jack connector on one side and an xrl to the other, to connect the mixer to the PA, usually through the channel box.

- a pair of headphones for the drummer

Once we have all these tools ready, we need obviously a backing track on our device, with on the left side the metronome track and the backing track, and on the right side just the backing track (of course you can switch them if you need, the important is that all tracks have the metronome on the same side.
Now we can connect the stereo cable to our mp3 player and send the Left Track (the one with the metronome too) in the first channel of the mixer, and the Right Track (the one without the metronome) in the second channel, as you can see from our Routing Scheme below:

In the 2 channels of our mixer now we must pan the left track full left and the right track full right in order to avoid the metronome to spill from the other track into the channel box.

Now we can connect on the left mono output the drummer's headphones, so that he can choose the song with the mp3 player and adjust the volume of the base with the mixer, and the right mono output of the mixer to the channel box, using the jack with one regular jack connector on one side (the mixer side) and the xrl connector on the other (for the channel box side). If we are connecting into another mixer without passing through a channel box, much probably we can use a regular jack.


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CLICK HERE FOR PART 3 OF 3


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