Opinions.....Is Arpeggiator Usage Considered "Live Performance"

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When the last band I was in went kaput, I tried to find new members with ideals that were the same as my own (play music people like, don’t get hammered, have fun). The search took over two years (and many false starts) to find a good drummer and guitarist. For the entirety of my search I looked for a keyboardist, and found a SINGLE person that was looking at a 45 minute commute (one way) and wanted a guaranteed $100 per show.

We didn’t want to limit our songs choices (We want to play Styx, Toto, Journey, etc…) so our only option was to use backing tracks. I also didn’t want to have to pay someone to run sound and pay someone else to run lights when the money isn’t really good for live music (in Northeast PA). I’m still looking for a keys player, and if I can find one we’ll stop using tracks, but it doesn’t look likely. And if the money ever gets better (fingers-crossed), I’ll bring on a sound person and light person.

I mention all of the above to show that I’ve experienced this live, and this is what I’ve learned.
1: Tracks don’t care if you missed the 4 count at the beginning of the song, they will start playing anyway
2: Tracks don’t care if you put fills in places that don’t have fills. IF you do it well, you don’t have to play the exact same thing every time, you just have to make it fit.
3: The audience doesn’t care that you’re using tracks to play Don’t Stop Believing, they’re just impressed that you’re playing it.
4: The person paying you for playing doesn’t care that you’re using tracks. If you’re entertaining and keep the drinks flowing they’ll pay you and sometimes even give you a bonus.
5: Other musicians care, and will look down their nose at you

Also, as @Corky mentioned, where does one draw the line when it comes to “cheating”. Does a vocal processor count as cheating? If so, what functions are actually cheating? Doubling? Harmonies? Autotune? Does having Cantabile switch presets via MIDI constitute cheating? Is using states cheating?

When we play live, we don’t pretend we’re doing things we’re not actively doing. We don’t have an unplugged keyboard on stage to pretend things. My bandmates don’t pretend to sing when the backing track has the backing vocals on it.

Are we cheating? If so, WHO IS BEING CHEATED?

edit: Replace “cheating” with “not live performance” and I don’t sound nearly as angry about it :smile:

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To begin with, no one is cheated. Full stop. Performance is just that and has a broad and still changing set of conventions. You could argue that older analog type organs,synths and EP’s aside, most modern keyboardists are really just performing on different digital control surfaces, not instruments in the classical sense, just like a DJ or track backed combo would be. It does break into separate arguments at that point. On the one hand the use of digital backing track playback (been done with open reels since the 50’s live!) and MIDI automation tracks. And the other argument is about whether when you trigger playback of samples with a piano/organ keyboard. I’ve been playing in this Virtual studio world for a while and often don’t consider it “virtual” when I’m the one doing the triggering! I get emotionally caught up in it and the better the velocity response and feel of my controller the more convincing it gets. Once recorded by someone else it is referred to as a performance and my playing technique and my musical choices become the focus, not the M-Audio controller and laptop I used. Hopefully I’m “triggering” in an interesting way that makes it unique and choosing pleasing sounds for my audience. :grin:

Dave

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Triggering sequences and tracks you made yourself is just a time-shifted performance :wink:

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I’ve had that epiphany as well.

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Really digging this discussion.

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Hey Robb, You are expressing many of the things I have either said or thought. After awhile, it becomes a flight into infinity. And really…who is to say what live performance is. I did a two-piece recurring gig about 10 yrs ago, and used a few backing tracks, but it was mostly live, but my partner used a harmony processor for his background vocals. I also did a live three-piece (no drummer) a few years ago, which fell flat on it’s face, even though the guys were great musicians. On the 2nd gig, I added Superior Drummer, and it took off, but I became quickly bored with it, and shut it down after about 20 gigs. Speaking only for myself, I enjoy the interaction of a full band. It challenges me to be a better musician. That is why my three piece experimental band is so close to my heart. A HUGE challenge to pull off difficult material with 3 people.

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Generally it’s going to be less about are you performing, or how much are you performing and a lot more about are you interesting. Tangerine Dream basically sit there and do nothing, but they make up for it with gear porn and great lights and effects. To a large extent that’s true of most electronic musicians. It’s even true of bands like Pink Floyd, or the early Genesis. If you’re a bar band all you need is to get people dancing and drinking. If you’re a concert band you have to give an audience something that makes their cash outlay seem justified- but does it really matter what??

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Very few people are dancing anymore, but I am sure my performance will make people want to drink !

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Well, drinking is the main one…

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I hardly use any arpeggiators, but I think there is nothing wrong with them. They’re just another tool to help me perform. In my funk cover band, we sometimes use midi backing tracks prepared by me to “thicken up” the overal sound and help me out because I’m also the lead singer. I think an arpeggiator falls into the same category. Many synth patches have several layers all moving around, like wobbles, rises and falls, etc. To recreate these types of sounds in an old-school way, I would have to use pedals and the modulation wheel but the synths just automate this, just like an arpeggiator does. I would love for our band to have a second person playing keys, but our practice room is too tiny and keyboard players are hard to come by where I live.

I don’t know about a song where the keyboard part consists entirely (and solely) of arpeggiators, I guess that would sound a bit artificial. Anyway, it would beat the purpose of playing music if you’re not actually playing :wink:

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Yeah…but driving people to drink? I guess that’s why Karaoke does so well.

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That has to be the best definition of live that I have ever come across! :smile:

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My opinion, having been in bands that were all live, and then mostly spending the last decade in one that used backing tracks, is that so long as you are putting on a good show, and the crowd love what you are doing, then it has worked out.

When I joined Pure Floyd in 2008, I was very tentative with joining, due to the fact that they used backing tracks, but then I came to realise that it is the only way that a four piece all male band is going to reproduce a full Floyd sound (all the background layers, female backing harmonies, sound effects). I had done some Floyd in my previous band, which was all live, and it never quite sounded right for that reason. People enjoyed what we did, but it was never a “full” floyd sound.

I also learnt that for a lot of Floyd songs to work, you need to play to a fairly strict tempo due to the importance of the BPM being in the right zone for the delay effects that Gilmour used, and few drummers can keep a steady tempo from start to finish. So you need a click. If you have a click, you can have a few backing tracks to underpin the live sound. You can do a light show without needing to pay a light man and have cue effects beat perfect. You can trigger videos and have them all in time.

In Pure Floyd on the pub and small club scene, so many people would come up to us and say we had nailed it: We might not have had the stage show of the larger tribute acts, but we had the sound (and good enough visuals for small venues), so we must have been doing something right, and we kept all the main parts live.

In the solo show I am working on, I have live arpeggios running on some songs, but they are running against the chords I am playing. On my Kronos, Karma can do even more than basic arpeggiating based on my chords (which I can get wrong!), and I can vary what it does on the fly - is that a performance? And some songs are to backing tracks

I guess I’ll also throw in the fact that my playing chops are more Rick Wright than Rick Wakeman. There are so many keyboard players out there (including many on this forum) that I am in awe of, but because I only started playing at the age of 30, and have very limited time for music due to work pressures, I will NEVER have the chops of a child prodigy. To compensate, I think I have an ear for good progressions and melody, and then to some degree I am happy to use technology to compensate for what I can’t do. So if I use technology, backing tracks, arpeggiators live does that make me a fraud?

And around here, the music scene is dying (smoking ban, cheap supermarket booze, cost of transport if you do not want to drive). This means there is now very little money in it. Whilst I do what I do as a labour of love, I need to break even at least, and one problem is that trying to make a “full” band pay is becoming impossible. So I am thinking on the “small” scene of a solo electronic act or a duo playing to tracks. In Welsh Floyd (if we get going again!), that is an 8 piece in small theatres and less reliance on backing, but as mentioned above you still need some.

And of course if there is a 3 or 4 piece band out there, all live, bringing the house down, then that is equally cool!

Hope my perspective makes sense. :slight_smile:

And of course Cantabile allows us to strike the balance we are each looking for.

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We played Baba O’Riley “live” the other night at an open mic. Since we never play anything note for note no one there is expecting it. It’s pretty funny to play the Lowrey organ marimba repeat part by hand.

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Very nice Derek. C3 has changed my way of thinking and performing. There is no way my 3-piece could do a full night of Floyd without backing. We do 3 Floyd songs, they are full and sound great, but song choice is essential, and I am one busy mutha during those songs. Whenever I get a chance to record us, I will post an example.
I watched the scene dwindle here as well. If I hadn’t established myself early on, I would be gigging very little now. I really have to fight for gigs anymore. I turn some down, usually because of low pay or long distance. On top of that, I’ve seen the big money, 10 piece performance driven bands not working as much with weddings and big events. They are now taking $400 gigs, forcing the smaller bar bands out. There are thousands of bands/solo acts here, so it has become very cutthroat, and the venues are closing down as well. If I decide to continue on, I may have to buy some equipment and do EDM, but I doubt I will be able to bounce up and down on my tiptoes for very long. :wheelchair:

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It is a problem. As Pure Floyd we could go out for £300 - £400, more than the usual rate, as the venues knew we would pack the place out and their bar take would be good, and we would only play each one about twice a year. But then a lot of places were closing five or six years ago, or there’d be a change of ownership and you were suddenly faced with the new owner pleading that times were hard, he hadn’t booked us, so no obligation to honour, but he’d keep is booked if we did it for £80 (that was the lowest example I can remember))! You can guess what the answer was!

In Welsh Floyd, a larger band where we were targeting the small theatres, it was a bit of a mixed bag. We were on a door take, so a risk. Sometimes we did well. Sometimes we came away at a loss after paying the hall hire and PA fees. A classic example was a lovely old cinema venue in Tonyrefail, one of the old valleys mining towns. An old Roadie (supported Steve Hackett) had retired there, and he and his daughter had brought and renovated the cinema to turn it into a concert venue. But they were struggling to make it pay, as few people are going out, and when they were, they were going to the pubs just down the road putting music on for free (and probably paying the band a pittance).

A bit of a tough one, and I can’t see it changing. So I keep meaning to try this one man show as an occasional thing at my local music venue to see how it goes. Pluses: you get all the money and you only get to argue with yourself! Minuses: You have to do all the gear lugging on your own

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Live performance is just what it says…the difference being playing material recorded by others; that’s why we have DJ’s who can also be considered performance or just the guy over in the corner playing records/CD/digital media for background or for dancing. This seems to have evolved into a live vs. tracks debate, which is cool, so here’s my quick weigh in. We started out as a classic 4 piece, with 4 personalities, 3 of which were of the same mind and one who was not. After a bit, we became a 3 piece when that “odd man out” literally became the odd man out. We auditioned many bass players, none who either fit musically or personally. Let’s face it, no matter what your job is, no one likes to go to work with people you can’t stand. So the decision was to go out as a 3 piece with myself and the guitarist splitting bass duties. Things were going well and we were enjoying ourselves and the slight increase in pay. After 6 months or so, the drummer announced that his wife was not doing well, and he was going to need to be available to be there for her, as hiring help was out of the question. So our decision was to again try to replenish the troops and keep it going or go our separate ways. So at one of our last rehearsals, we decided to record just for posterity, because we knew it was the end of a good thing. 3 guys who got along great and made good music and we all know, that’s a rarity. So, in an effort to make the recording decent, we played a couple of songs, and only recorded the drums. The second time through, only me and then only the guitar (we used a metronome just for reference) We promised our drummer we would get together as often as possible and jam. It was very hard for all of us, but especially him, to have to leave something good. So the guitarist and I were sitting around have a cold one and I put on the rehearsal tape we had made and we listened to each part and the whole mix together and talked about the road forward. My thought was, I’ve been doing this for 45 years and I just can’t go through the audition process again…now replacing two members. So I made the suggestion, since he and I were a 3 piece without a drummer (we also did most of the lead vocals), what about TRACKS. We debated much as everyone who has contributed to this subject has and decided to see how viable it would be. Fortunately our drummer played a very nice electronic set, so capturing his part was easy. It kind of solved two problems; one being his longing to still somehow be a part of something and the other which was to get ourselves a drummer. Once we had his tracks, we decided to embellish the tracks and make them closer to the original. Our gig was providing dance music, rather than putting on a show. The guitarist recorded all the bass parts, which thankfully freed up my left hand, and I was able to properly fill out the keyboard parts. We both chimed in on backing vocals where needed and we had our tracks. We didn’t inform the venues, we just showed up and played. One club owner asked where everybody was, and I told him, we are all here in some form. Is it restrictive…yes, at times it is, but not as much as you’d think, since again, we are there to provide dance music.

My feeling is if you are a musician, you are a musician. If you have an arpeggiator, or 10 keys in a midi chain, or you’re using C3 to run your lights, etc. it’s all good. I was never one for musical snobbery. Who am I to say the way you practice your craft isn’t pure. Music is entertainment…how you get there is how you get there. If the crowd is still there at the end of the night, you’ve done your job

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Good POV, and interesting story, Steve.

In all the years I have one Pure Floyd/Welsh Floyd, I think I only ever heard one complain about the fact we were using tracks and played over them. Another way I look at it, is if it was good enough for the original Pink Floyd, it is good enough for me.

Of course, try and play as much live as possible.

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Another way I look at it, is if it was good enough for the original Pink Floyd, it is good enough for me

Excellent point. Many (!) big, renowned, professional groups use tracks and automation. Nothing wrong with them, as long as they are well incorporated and not used to camouflage the band’s lack of playing skills.

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I am still digging this conversation. Very good to get differing views. So, let me throw a little gasoline on this fire.
I mentioned above about a singer doing a 4 hr bar gig with karaoke backing tracks, and getting the same pay as a 4-piece band playing there.
Also, I knew a guy in Florida, playing in a small bar using midi files on a cheap sound card. He strapped on a guitar, and occasionally strummed it, but it was mostly sound card. He did 3 nights a week for 10yrs, and managed to put 2 children through college with the extra money.
I also knew a karaoke guy that setup in a small fraternal organization, was paid $600 for 3 hrs every Wednesday. Bands on the weekend got $350. Audience number was about the same for both, so crowd size was not reflective of price.
My personal thinking on these three situations are different.

THOUGHTS ??

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