Is Performing With A Backing Track Cheating? My Opinion...

I've had some people ask me to weigh in on this controversy between Eddie Trunk and Ronnie Radke from Ben Falling in Reverse and Sebastian Bach it's all about playing with backing tracks and I have a lot of thoughts on this uh just for those of you that don't know anything about what I'm talking about so Ronnie Radke's in his band Falling in Reverse and he's had a tweet saying that sorry I never make videos like this but I feel like I owe it to you guys we show up to rehearsals and our laptops are missing and we run all of our show stuff on it and as a band in 2022 you need your laptop she's like a car driving without an engine so they couldn't play this particular gig because of not having their laptops so Eddie Trunk responded this is back in April he responded I've long railed against the epidemic of bands using tracks live and now fans and promoters just accept live acts and pains to see a live band and it's anything but this is how bad it's become everyone okay with this unreal and then Sebastian Bach and Ronnie Radke got into it with each other Ronnie Radke accused Sebastian Bach of using tracks he says wow dummy are you saying that you believe I use tracks on stage and then he says watch what happens when track bands call real musicians idiots if any of you remember the SNL in 2004 with Ashley Simpson she was on SNL she was doing two songs Jude Law was the host of it this is the most embarrassing moment ever essentially ruined her career as a singer so the band was playing their second song the drummer started the sequence and then this happened so they started the song they don't even realize it yet I think they're starting to realize it and her vocal comes in and it's obvious that she was gonna lip sync and the band doesn't even know what to do she's doing this weird jig and then she eventually just walks off stage she tried to explain it she blamed it on the drawer blah blah blah that was the end of her career so bands have used backing tracks for decades if you go back and watch videos of the who playing Baba O'Riley in the 70s you can see in this picture Keith Moon's wearing headphones because he's actually playing with the keyboard part that's on a 24 track or whatever they used to play it back and because they didn't have a keyboard player on stage Pete Townsend's playing guitar but that part's going through it and during that song he had headphones taped on his head and he's listening to The Click track and hearing the sequence play and that's how they were able to play Baba O'Riley live I remember uh in the early 90s that I knew bands I've played gigs with workstations like the in Sonic sq1 where you'd have a sequence program that might have pads or something or or sound effects with percussion and your drummer would take the right out meaning the right side output it'd have a count off and they play to a click and the sequence would start wherever it started and he'd be locked to a click and then those parts would just come in it would make your band sound Fuller a lot of bands did this people didn't really know about it and and typically the drummer would start the sequence from the keyboard in the background in the early 2000s people would play with mini discs so they were stable I don't know if you remember many disc players I was working at the studio here in Atlanta and the singer for train came in to redo their set they played with these backing tracks for Drops of Jupiter you know they couldn't carry around a string orchestra with them so they played along with it because without that that's pretty much the whole song so you needed that okay so he came in and they dumped the stuff from Pro Tools and they had a few other songs they had things but he would of course sing the lead vocals things like that and the other guys would sing the background vocals these were just things to augment the songs and when I started producing bands wanted backing tracks and it became really common for us to provide them this was a service that producers did but my assistant Ken or GL that you've seen on my channel before he would make up their backing tracks so the backing tracks would consist of a click track and then any auxiliary Parts they could do many times it would be background vocals as well because typically we'd worked with bands that would only have one person that could sing so my thing was that okay if you guys are going to use these let's blend the things back in so that people don't notice them it shouldn't be parts that are obvious if there's a keyboard part in a song that's not an obvious moving part fine put it in if it's a if it's a pad put it in I try to encourage the bands to play as much live stuff as possible and even if you had background vocals in there sing along with it so it seems real and I go to the shows and most of the time to be honest with you you wouldn't even notice they were playing with it the drummer would trigger it from Pro Tools or whatever they would use back in the time they would trigger the sequence or they would play with some type of recorder people used to play with iPods and they would split the signal the stereo signal and they take a mono send out with these things and they would come through the speakers most live shows are mono and the reason they're mono is because you don't want people that come to hear Jeff Beck and Jeff Beck is only he's on the left side of the stage and he's only coming through the left speaker what about the people sitting on the right side so most sound systems are mono so that people can hear everything that they've paid to hear okay so that's not that was not a problem at the time you know now you can split things out it go out the sound to the sound board and the sound guy can actually mix in at different levels all the different stems but they didn't have stems back then and in 2004 Ashley Simpson this was a major disaster and it really made all of us rethink how we did backing tracks in that everybody wanted the name of the song to go with the count off so would say pieces of me two three four click click click click and then you'd start in so there would be no doubt that the drummer and everyone that's hearing the headphones would hear the name of the song before the count off started so you weren't starting in the wrong songs you wouldn't have a disaster like this so we would always slate the song title and then the click would start and here's the interesting thing when I'd go see bands play live that we made backing tracks for the songs that we didn't make backing tracks for always sounded weaker they just did you know I love live playing I want the bands to be able to play live but you know to be objective about it all the sound effects that swelled into the chorus all the auxiliary Parts in the chorus it could be some guitar weird effect part that you could never create live the guys would be playing the main parts on their things or you know if there were background vocals that they couldn't do or vocal effects or something like that but typically you know we would never have the lead vocal in there and we would mix their whole set so the whole set would be in order um and you go from one side to the next and the drummer would be responsible or the sound guy for starting and stopping the sequences and moving to the next one nowadays it's really complex so most of the bands that have come in here that I've interviewed that are my friends play with backing tracks okay a big part of their show is is related to it because they're not just running their tracks off of it they're running their pedal switches because they're playing with neural DSP quad cortex or they play with ax effects and what would happen is they start the beginning of their set and the whole set's programmed so that every song the drummer is playing to a click everybody's hearing the click of their in-ears they're hearing a mix of what they're doing and they're hearing all the backing tracks right and the pedal changes are happening meaning midi a midi cable is plugged into their multi-effects unit that's creating their guitar sounds because they're not using any real amplifiers so all of their pedal changes on every song when it goes to lead their guitar if they're standing out of the front of the stage all of a sudden the lead sound is just there and they'd play it and then as soon as the lead's over they'd slide off the echo would Trail off or whatever and then the Rhythm sound would be there and these are the exact sounds that they used on the records but they're locked to a click for every song so there's no variation from show to show typically unless they reorder the set so for a lot of these bands everything is run off the laptop it's not just the guitar changes the extra parts it's also the light show is coming right off the same information each track contains all the pedal switching for both guitar players the bass player whatever has all the extra parts of the backing guitars backing vocals the keyboards it contains all the instructions for the lighting so so it's all that's why they need the laptops that's why they're so important for the show from Prague metal to metal bands to to pop X things like that they all do it a lot of the old bands don't do it because it's they don't want to get into the technology of it the Rolling Stones don't do it uh Jeff Beck isn't playing with backing tracks but most contemporary bands play with backing tricks it's a fact does it bother me no because I I don't know why I've just um I think that if you can get away with having spontaneity meaning you're not locked to the same tempo every night you can play songs with different arrangements to me that was the thing about going to see a band live that's why certain bands have huge live followings whether it's uh you know fish or or dead and Company or Grateful Dead Or whoever you know bands that can really play live and can vary the songs from night to night tend to have really big live followings because they get a different show each night when I saw Pearl Jam they're not playing with backing tracks They have a hundred songs on their set list that they have to choose from and they sound amazing because they're used to playing like that it what it's not until you've found you know people that started in the late 90s early 2000s that it was even a thing because you really didn't even have access to your backing tracks because people didn't have Pro Tools sessions afterwards nowadays bands have Pro Tools sessions of the mixes and they can make their own backing tracks and they can vary them they say we don't need this part we don't need that part so the producers don't even end up making their backing tracks and now they are stemmed out meaning that they might have eight different tracks coming out of a Pro Tools reg or an Ableton rig eight different stereo stems that go out to the mixing console and the mixer will mix them in as if they're players so that's my thing about that and the the arguing about this should Ronnie Radke have come out and said no we can't play because of her laptops I don't know in retrospect maybe that wasn't a good move I mean it doesn't matter to me that's that's the reality of thing when I read his tweet I didn't even think anything of it it didn't even I didn't even register and then I saw Eddie Trunk comment on it and then then the Sebastian Bach that go the back and forth between Ronnie Radke and Sebastian Bach was was crazy but but the uh and Ronnie was saying you know Aerosmith plays dream on with backing tracks how does Steven Tyler's piano go on when he gets away from the piano and you still hear it or how does this happen how's that happen people have been playing backing tracks for decades decades most people don't notice as a matter of fact I don't notice it most of the time that's what I have to say on it do I like it doesn't matter to me at all as long as they do it well anyways if you haven't subscribed hit the Subscribe button and thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rick Beato

Views: 851,131

Keywords: rick beato, everything music, rick, beato, music, music theory, music production, education, backing tracks, controversy, Sebastian Bach, ronnie radke, Laptop Lost, Playing with backing tracks, falling in reverse, lip sync, lip syncing, Eddie Truck, Producer Reacts

Id: SZXUPuiC9Eo

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022