Advice on running samples live

[TheMasterplan]

Howdy,

I have a symphonic melodic death metal band and no keyboardist to play any of the orchestral stuff live. I have zero experience with what I'm trying to do so I'm hoping you guys can help. Where do I start? Do I just have a prerecorded track with all the parts and have a drummer play to a click or what are my options?

Thanks in advance

 

[buriedoutback]

1. Pan the clicks to 1 side and the orchestral stuff to the other side (hard Left and hard Right).
2. export to high quality mp3 or wav
3. put the files on an old ipod or iphone - turn on airplane mode
4. get a 1/8inch to dual 1/4inch mono cable
5. get a cheap behringer mixer and a DI box
6. send the click tracks to the mixer for your drummer (mixers have headphone out >> in-ear-monitors and the ability to plug in kick trigger/other signals)
7. send the orchestral stuff to the DI and then DI -> front of house/PA system
8. \m/ \m/

 

[buriedoutback]

example of a 1/8 to dual 1/4 cable : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZKM3SHK/?tag=sevenstringorg-20

example of a cheap mixer : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000J5XS3C/?tag=sevenstringorg-20

example of a di box : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000KUA8G6/?tag=sevenstringorg-20

example of in ears : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07B4PR2GD/?tag=sevenstringorg-20

 

[Metropolis]

I have done this with individual buses for both click and backing track, panned to hard left/right and used Brainworx BX solo to make stereo tracks to mono, so in the end there are two mono tracks panned to L/R. With similar cheap setup like buriedoutback explained, and it works.

 

[Sanrek]

If you can keep it simple with a single mono sample track + click track, I would definitely recommend buriedoutback’s solution.

Simple, cheap and effective.

Now if for whatever reason you need more than one single mono sample track + click (I.E our band uses separate sample tracks, like backing vocals, choirs, orchestral stuff, with a stereo option depending on the venue), well…you have two options:

1/Dedicated laptop with a live-oriented DAW (Reaper with sws extension to add these functions would be my choice here) paired with a small multi outputs audio interface.

Or

2/ A nice all-in-one hardware solution, like the Cymatic audio LP-16, or its big brother the utrack 24.

Both these units can stream several audio tracks + midi at once from a usb key / hard drive (We’re using a utrack 24 right now) with all the bell and whistle you could ask for (they were designed to do exactly that: playing backing tracks, and in the case of the utrack, double as a multitrack recorder)

My two cents.