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Does anyone have good advice about using drum and backing tracks live? Maybe some good/bad examples for me? Dos and don'ts? I want to put together some stuff for live shows, but I'd like any advice y'all have to give. I'm going to mess with importing drum tracks to an RC30 I just got, and I'm going to mess with adding other sounds/parts to different tracks on it, but what else? Thoughts?

We're running Ableton live for our rehearsals right now and trying things out.

Ableton is nice because you can speed up and slow down the tracks as the jams increase/decrease in intensity as well as do full sequences through multiple parts. Having everything lined up as clips is also awesome as you can drop in and out of different grooves / time signatures on beat so it'll allow some improvisation on top of the regular performance. You can also get a bit more solid of a sound out of a laptop rig than the pedals from my experience.

All that it comes down to is being okay with being that band with a laptop on stage.

I don't have a laptop right now, so I'm going to be using the aforementioned RC30 and/or a drum machine. I'm more curious about how to get drum machines to not sound crappy, and basically how to make a solo performance with backing tracks not look really lame. I'm convinced that the trick has to do in part with using the gear the way it was meant to be used, and not trying to do things like make synthetic drums sound real. My biggest issue is that I was to write really heavy, technical stuff, but for now, it's going to be a solo thing.

I'm about to start the process of programming songs with more electronic/industrial percussion, instead of fake "real" drums.