If you’ve been to a Fun DMC show in the past two years, it’s hard to not notice that we pack in a lot of sound for only three instrumentalists and two lead singers.  Sometimes you may instruments that aren’t on stage.  Sometimes it seems like there’s a wall of harmonies on certain songs.  Sometimes the bass player may have run offstage mid-song to grab a camera and take some photos of the hula hoop contest.

It’s time to address the elephant in the room:

We use backing tracks.

On every song.

Setting aside the issue of musical integrity and the technical side for a moment (that’s in the next parts of this series!), let’s take a trip back a ways, when Fun DMC looked very different.

We were still five-strong, but were made of a Robert on guitar, Paige on vocals, Talon on drums, Brian on bass, and I handled keys, rhythm guitar, and auxiliary instruments. We were playing a small handful of mashups and had recently introduced a second long medley, but it was mostly a lot of upbeat covers.  Our previous drummer had previously played to a click, but we weren’t using backing tracks – everything was performed live with a few things triggered by my keyboard.  It was all working great until Brian had to suddenly and permanently step out of the band due to the very early arrival of his daughter.  That had me moving over to my primary instrument of bass on short notice, but it also left an empty spot where all the keyboard stuff had been.  As we were moving towards more mashups and medleys, moving forward without integral pieces of our songs wasn’t an option.  Imagine “Uptown Funk” without horns, “Hey Jude” without piano, or “Forget You” without organ.  Not to mention moving around a lot of vocals that Brian had lead meant weakening some of our existing big harmonies.  In total, roughly fifty songs or chunks of songs were going to have to be figured out.

Oh, and did I mention that we had less than two weeks to fill that gap and for me to learn all the bass parts before our next show?

Filling Brian’s spot on bass and vocals was daunting, partly because of how intimidatingly good he is, but also his powerful stage presence.  While I burned through his parts as best as I could, Robert and I also made the decision to begin the next evolutionary stage of Fun DMC – backing tracks to fill up all the keyboard parts.

Robert and Talon had plenty of experience with backing tracks.  The church that Robert worked at and Talon played at had been using them in Ableton Live for a few years, so both were familiar with the process and playing to a click.  Fun DMC had been on in-ear monitors and a personal mix set up since day one, so it didn’t take a lot of equipment changes.  Additionally, I had been using Ableton for all of my keyboard tones and triggers, so I knew my way around the software as well.  Paige and new singer, Sam, were on-board, so off we went to make this happen as soon as possible.

Thus began one of the longest few nights of our lives as Robert and I divided and conquered our entire set, song by song, and piece by piece.  From his house in Springfield, Robert would set up a click, record a scratch guitar and vocal, and send me a GarageBand file.  Then, from my living room an hour away, I record all of my keyboard parts and samples.  While I was at it, I also recorded all of the harmonies for all of the songs to help thicken things up as we transitioned all of our vocalists as well.  I would then save the files back and send the back to Robert, who would drop them in Ableton and move on to the next one.  We did this for days, fighting compatibility issues, exhaustion, and sometimes spotty wifi, but when it was all said and done, every song that needed an accompaniment had one.  We put a pin in some of the songs that we could get by without, but after a few practices and some adjustment to our front of house sound, we were show-ready again.

But that was just the story of how we suddenly had to move to click tracks.  Next up is taking that concept and running as hard as we could with it.