Hi Guys,

One of my friends is getting married in a few months and we thought it might be nice if we reunited our school days band for one night only to be his wedding band.

We have our lead singer/guitarist, lead guitarist and me (bass player) but no drummer.

Ideally what I'm looking for is some kind of option to have pre-programmed drum track(and any other instruments, such as Valen Halen - Jump Synths!) that we would all play along with. This would hopefully keep us all in time and be a pretty simple solution. We'd be mostly thinking of playing 80's and 90's hits, quite cheesey stuff.

My knowledge of music technology is about a decade out of date so I'd appreciate any advise on the easiest way of doing this. A decade ago I would have thought midi tracks through Cubase/Logic would have been the way to go but I'm sure there are some kind of developments since then.

We're looking for something that will sound decent and be really easy to work with.

Any advice on how to proceed would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

I use cubase to play back either freely available or home made midi backings, using BFD2, Trillian and Kontakt, rendered as WAV's and converted to ALAC for playback on iPod / Touch. Works well for us (see our site / vids in sig). It can take a bit of getting used to, but if you can play along to a drum machine well, it shouldn't be an issue if you all know the material and when / where changes happen.

Good luck, it will make for a very memorable wedding!

Ritchie
Pretty Vegas

--------------------
Engineering Surveyor and Musician Pretty Vegas Northwest Function and Wedding Band
Wedding Band Blog

Just get hold of a drum machine. Unless you're going to put a lot of time and effort into rehearsing this it's going to be a shambles anyway - but hopefully a fun shambles! You'll get out with the backing track, so keep it simple.

Feel free to really take this seriously and prove me wrong though :-)

Alternatively, can't you rope in a drummer?

Thanks guys, I'd be hoping we could do a semi-decent job but realistically this might take quite a lot of practice. We used to be quite good, about 10-15 years ago, honestly:)

Doing a bit of further recon on it and it would be handiest if we could get multi-track versions of the songs we want to do and just drop out the instruments we are going to play.

I think this might be easier than programming drums etc and sound better, closer to the original, giving us extra instruments if needed.

Have found some MOGG files that seem to be based around the Rock Band games, does a legitimate/legal version of this kind of thing exist where we could get the songs we wanted?

Thanks again for all the help, it's much appreciated.