How to use a backing track
You’ve got your backing track prepared and you’re ready to rock out on stage, but how?
Posted: 19 November 2019
Read time: 5 mins
A backing track is there to help you fill in the gaps of your live performance. It’s not always easy to have an army of backing singers on stage or have someone working a synth for all of your one-shots and FX. It makes much more sense to just put all of those elements into a backing track so that you are always able to perform with your band at its core. But how do you set this up?
What you’ll need
For this, you’re going to need three things: something to play your backing track from, in-ear monitors for your drummer and cables to connect everything up.
Something to play your backing track from
This is most likely going to be a laptop but it can be anything that has a headphone jack on it, such as an MP3 player or even your phone. The main thing to keep in mind is that, whatever you use, it’s got to be easy to press play. The laptop is often the best bet for this as you can just hit the spacebar. It’s important that the signal you send out to the engineer is balanced, so for this you’ll need to use a DI box.