Backing Tracks - How to....advice

Tone_Loc

Member
Been playing with a 5 piece band for a while now and have always used BTs to support our repertoire. We've had a typical basic setup where we use Bandhelper to play an MP3, which has the audio panned left and click panned right. Although rather inflexible, this method however has served us well.

Three of us, being main vox/guitar - guitar/vox & drums/vox, are now embarking on a new venture where we would like to utilise BTs more. We would be looking at pre-recorded bass, keys and possibly some additional supporting vocals. The ability to use the same track and drop out the bass parts, for the times where we use a bass player, would be handy, although not critical.
This leads to mixing the tracks at gigs. The importance of a strong driving bassline leads me to believe that we should have an individual out from whatever audio player, specifically for the bass. Thinking we could get away with say 3-4 outs max, being bass - vox/keys - click.
Sticking with the simplistic theme, is there a way of achieving the above by using an ios/android device? We dont want to start lugging a laptop to gigs and would love to continue to use BH.

FYI, we plan on using either the XR18 or Soundcraft UI16 as our mixer. Both of these give us sufficient Aux outs and the control is flexible and unit is compact. Would welcome any personal experience from those that use the UI16.

I found the users on this forum to be generally well informed and intelligent so am looking forward to your thoughts and comments.
 
http://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/advanced_audio.html

"You can play two recordings simultaneously if you turn on Settings > Audio & MIDI > Audio Options > Play First Two Recordings Together, and you can then route them to different output channels with the Recording 1/2 Output Channel settings."

"When no external audio interface is connected, your multi-route audio settings will be ignored and BandHelper will play all audio through the default route (the built-in speaker or headphone jack)."

So perhaps use an audio interface with multi outputs for the Bass track. And when you don't need the bass, just use the regular Headphone out with the first track split for instruments and click.
 
Thx Chris.
That solves the playback then! So BH can output up to 4 separate tracks then. What an impressive app.
We've previously only used the headphone out to split the channels and send them directly to the mixer, so how do you get the other 2 going? What sort of audio interface do we need to look for?
 
Thx Chris.
That solves the playback then! So BH can output up to 4 separate tracks then. What an impressive app.
We've previously only used the headphone out to split the channels and send them directly to the mixer, so how do you get the other 2 going? What sort of audio interface do we need to look for?
i haven't kept up with mobile audio interfaces in a while, but you can probably Google search iOS audio interface (or android). IK Multimedia makes some, i think Apogee as well. but definitely look for the multi-track or multi in/out capabilities. they'd connect via Lightning port (USB on android) and become the "soundcard" for the mobile device.
 
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