First, some background…
I was walking around Downtown Disney (in Anaheim, CA) a couple of months ago, enjoying the various street acts that Disney hires to play. One of the acts was a solo guy who played guitar and sang on top of recorded tracks laid down that were inserted into his mix. I have a bunch of songs that I have in ProTools that I’d love to output and play and sing on top of when I gig.
So my question is: What kind of equipment will allow me to do this? Is an Akai MCP[500, 1000, 2500] the answer? Or is there a more straight-forward solution that doesn’t require sequencing?
Thanks for the input!
GoofyDawg
I haven’t done this myself, but seen and talked to lots of folks doing different things:
-Once I met a guy who had an iPod hooked up to his mixer (small mixer) and used background tracks in the iPod to play acoustic and sing over. Sounded pretty good to me. You can just upload your ProTools tunes into the iPod and you’re set. I’m assuming you have a small mixer and a small-type PA for an acoustic and mic.
-I’ve also seen folks with laptops, and using various software packages to run the soundfiles. Still not sure how they hooked up the laptop to the sound system as to kill the computer soundcard noise, probably just had a really good soundcard. Most set ups I’ve seen use a mac laptop, which comes with good soundcards.
-It’s rare that I’ve seen folks using an actual samplers/sequencers to do what you want to do. I’ve seen folks use samplers/sequencers to actually create stuff on stage and loop with it and jam to it, which is a different ball game than just playing an already produced background track that’s ready for you to play over. So, I don’t know that a sampler/sequencer would be a good buy for you given that you already have ProTools and the whole production end of it. But, maybe you want to create samples/sequences on the fly at a gig and get really funky and crazy like that. Stand alone samplers are just so expensive, and you might be better off investing in gear that can do more for you. It seems that the tech trend is moving away from stand-alone units and more into computing. So, an investment in computing and processing power (say a laptop/mp3 players, etc) seems smarter than buying a stand-alone unit that will be outdated tomorrow.
I caught a show at Austin SXSW’s festival, a metal band from the UK called Jesu. They used a mac laptop for lots of background textures on stage, it was really nice. This guy from Mac Life wrote a bit about it that may shed some light for you:
http://www.maclife.com/article/editors_blog_sxsw_music_mac_metal_madness_eugene_says_yeah
Just what I think…
IG