Originally Posted By: Notes Norton
If the dance floor is full, and it would be a good idea to extend the song, you can't do that.

I agree that making good tracks is hard, and it's time-consuming, sometimes difficult to get right, but I wouldn't call it work. Work is schlepping the gear.


Good stuff as usual Notes. But let me lay out a scenario and see what you think.

Unless the situation is that the dance floor fills up DURING a song you would really like to extend, don't you see anything trending that specific songs find the dance floor quickly loading up when you start playing it? (Here's a text version of the flow chart from the nerd.)

IF that is true that (I'll say some song here) Twist And Shout always loads the dance floor...

(IF no stop reading. IF YES keep reading.)

then you could go into your song file, copy and paste an extra chorus, verse and chorus into it so you have 2 more solo spots to extend the song, and call it T&S-EXT? Then when you see the crowd has the potential for a lot of dancers coming out onto the floor you load T&S-EXT instead of T&S. Of course if you are playing for a crowd not motivated toward the dance floor but appreciating you almost exclusively from the seats, you load T&S.

I know what you mean that you can't decide mid bridge to extend the song playing live with tracks.

We used to have a thing where when we played our cheesy Elvis spoof of Viva Las Vegas I would watch the crowd, and if they were hanging around on the dance floor I would sing, in key, "But is he good for one mooooooore time" and we'd pick up on the vamp and do a go around. There were nights the crowd joined in on the silliness and we milked that song for 15 minutes. One night some girl from the crowd brought up the cape she was wearing that night and wrapped it around our singer like an Elvis move, and as he started off the stage I did my schtick and he threw the cape off to sing more "Vivaaaaaa Las Vegas". Good times in that band that we couldn't do with tracks.

As far as the cons, most nights I WAS the guy chasing the opposite sex so I can't speak to that.

As far as making the tracks being work, I'd call it work in that I spend time on it, but it IS part of the job as much as sitting in boring IT meetings talking about things we already know about used to be. I don't really prepare tracks for live performance like you do, but as much as I like to play producer I play with stuff a lot. There was a jazz guy from Sacramento named Cecil Ramirez who sadly passed away from pancreatic cancer about a year ago. He used to stream on Sunday nights during Covid and then make the streams available for streaming as reruns. His 2nd album, that never got released due to his passing had a song called Faces In The Mirror. I downloaded the stream, snipped that song out of the hour, and loaded it into a DAW. In playing with it I took the B section and swapped it with the A section. I then sent it to him with a note that "This just seems to flow better to my ears when these sections are swapped." His reply was "Oh man, you really have me thinking now. I like that better too. I don't have to pay you for that little bit of production, do I? LOL" He was a great guy. I miss him.

But to topic, there are bands who use tracks and bands who don't. It's a matter of personal taste. I personally would rather see 5 or 6 people on stage who can play, sing, AND work together to make the collective sound good, if only because it means more musicians have jobs. And my preference for original music (with the implied degrees of disdain for covers) has been on display often here.

Still comes down to "You do you" and make YOUR life happy, not mine.

Last edited by eddie1261; 11/03/22 05:46 AM.