Band drummer has left !!

[pjd1]

Maybe someone here can give me some advice , until the lockdown i was playing with a 4 piece band , drums , bass , guitar , and singer , we were in a studio every week for a long time , couple of years maybe just plodding on , new drummer , new keyboard player , finally settled with a 4 piece , drummer decides the bass player is to loud and leaves the band , just like that !! i am toying with the idea of recording on my equipment bespoke tracks of the songs which we used to play (which we added to or took away) bits and bobs to make them longer for live performance etc , basically Drums and Keybords in the backing tracks , with space left for my guitar and the bass player , played back through are PA and then played live , never done it before with other people involved with the mix ,

Anybody got any Ideas on the process and how to pull it off live ( dont want to spend all winter making backing tracks for it to fall down for something i had not thought off )

Thanks

Dunny

[WarpCanada]

Not sure this is the answer you wanna hear but I would go ahead and record with your DAW using some canned drums,
and then get a new drummer when you go out to play live.

There's no magic thing that's gonna make a live Rock or Country band sound good with canned drums.

Last time I saw someone playing Rock or Country getting away with canned drums at a live show, it was a house show for five people, so that was okay.

If your band is cool with backing tracks, fine, but it's your audience that has to be cool with it, or not cool.

If you do wanna go ahead, the secret is to make fun of yourself, and not take yourself too seriously, and make sure your audience has a great time, and if they do, they'll go home and laugh about your jokes about the canned drums, instead of saying "gee that was lame".

What can I say, when I go to a live show as an audience member, I can live with a crap guitarist and a crap keys player, as long as the bassist and drummer are tight, the show was good.

[bruno]

I've done it. However, we never tried to sound like players, but made it particularly electronic. Synthy bass lines and 80's sounding drums. That worked - however the technology was a bigger pain that humans!
It is possible, and when right, can sound great.

The video is here as an example (scroll to the middle of the second video) I playing the violin. Paul was controlling everything using Reaper.
https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPTEvaHyh_CQDSWIG66rqnVkMaE6Na1H8VtQBO4bLAj-8Wftmi0fH6xwKk98Igzbg?key=UkdXaElibUx4MVVINllWR2U4c2FnVjFVdlFQV0hR

B

[Ferryman]

I did this in the 80s when I was playing very seriously and trying hard to make it. We had a really good band that achieved moderate success and nearly got signed but it all went wrong. The next iteration was the core of the band (singer, me on guitar and bassist) but no drummer. We had fallen out with our previous drummer and couldn't find a decent one, so as drum machines were a thing, we recorded all the drums on a backing track along with a few synth/keyboard parts and the rest of us played live over the top. We used an early Tascam four-track cassette recorder to record and play back the drum and backing tracks.

It worked pretty well from a musical perspective. It sounded good on recordings. However, it was never quite the same live. Everyone that saw us said that live performances just lacked a certain "something", despite bands with drum machines being a "thing" in the 80s. We were a fairly rocky/gothy band rather than synth pop, so I kind of got that. We never got the same level of buzz that the previous iteration of the band got.

So it depends on the type of music you play. If you are a rock band, you will definitely miss something in live performance. If you are folky/acoustic-y/ballads, maybe not.     

[pjd1]

thank You warpcanada , bruno , and ferryman , i will take into account everything you have written down here , i thought maybe i could just a backing track MP3 format or any other , and then just bang it through the PA , which wont give me any kind of mix with what i put down on the track , better to have the drums, and a keyboard track separate so you adjust the mix etc so thats one thing, the other is what ferryman has said about the live drums which is probably the going to be the bugbear of it , i will put down some tracks using my BR800 using diffrent tracks for the instruments and try and give the lads an idea of how it might or might not work , thank you so much for your reply,s and knowledge great stuff chaps try and let you know how i get on

Dunny

[TPB]

Ran into the same things years back ended up buying trio pedal by Digitech listens to your chord and lays down a drum and bass track has different styles and has three switchable sections Verse Chorus Bridge all in all a great pedal vary nice sounding drums and the levels can be set at the pedal, Now the bad part the old pedal would only do one song and no memory to store (I believe the new pedals have a storage for songs) Would run the set in the laptop as a MP3 file and route through the mixer to the mains. Bad point you would not be doing any request unless you played the chords through the pedal first.  All in all other than the bad points mentioned a outstanding pedal easy to use and if the new ones have song storage that is what I would use
Good luck brother let me know what you work out
Tim

[Farrell Jackson]

Hey Dunny, I understand your problem completely...been there and done that. Like you we were a 4 piece (2 guitars, bass and drums) and our drummer moved and we had gigs scheduled. Since we were in a pinch and had previously recorded all our cover songs, I removed the other tracks and made a recording of just the drums, put it on a CD and made a set list to follow. We ran it through our P.A. Besides not having the energy of a real drummer, we had to follow the set list and play the songs exactly as recorded every time. Otherwise, it was real easy to lose track of where we were. So there wasn't any talking/playing to the crowd for an extended intro or jamming out an extended solo. Nothing worse than the canned drummer going into a early or late roll/break or ending the song too soon and making us look and sound amateurish. Which happened a more than once before we kicked the no good canned drummer to the curb and got a real one. But he did get us through the scheduled gigs, didn't ask for any pay, didn't drink at all and didn't hit on our wives, lol!

I like Tim's suggestion with the Trio pedal. I've messed with the older model and it does work well for jamming with a drummer that reacts to your playing. I think you might be able to bypass the bass also but not real sure on that. Good luck and let us know where you go with this problem.

Farrell   

[Ferryman]

But he did get us through the scheduled gigs, didn't ask for any pay, didn't drink at all and didn't hit on our wives, lol!

And he probably kept time better, I know ours did!

[pjd1]

Thank you TBP, Farrell and Ferryman , i like the sound of the Digitech pedal , but i would have to remove the bass from it , but that would still leave me with no keyboards , so i am going to put some songs down on my recorder and maybe put them on CD or MP3 which i can send via Whattsapp , and see what the lads think , before i commit to laying down lots of tracks which takes a lot of time as you all know , good news about that is because of lockdown , we probably have months before we meet at the studios maybe March next year , but i will get a feel from them about the process and what it entails , looks like you have all had a "get out of jail" plan at some point in your musical journey , thank you all for your input , i have all of them bubbling around in my head . great stuff lads

Dunny

[TPB]

No problem with the BAss there are two volume knobs on the pedal one for drums and one for bass so you can turn either one off
Tim