Your first real gig is booked, and the sound engineer at the venue asks you to send "the backing tracks." You have a finished song and a project with sixty channels. Getting from one to the other is a job of its own, and doing it well is the difference between a show that sounds like your record and one that sounds like karaoke.
Decide what is live and what plays from the track
Start with the stage, not the files. Write down who performs what: you sing the lead, a friend plays guitar, everything else comes from playback. Every part that is played or sung live has to come out of the track. If the guitar is on stage and in the playback at the same time, the doubled part sounds messy and nobody can fix it from the mixing desk.
Be careful with vocals. Most artists remove the lead vocal completely and keep some backing vocals, harmonies or ad-libs on the track. That is normal, but keep it honest: if the lead line is still audible under you, the audience hears it, especially in quiet moments.
Splitting a song into stems for live playback
You rarely need every channel. For live playback, group the session into a handful of stems the sound engineer can balance in the room:
- drums and percussion
- bass
- keys, synths and pads
- backing vocals
- effects and small details: risers, impacts, vocal chops
- any instrument that might be played live later, as its own stem
Export every stem from the same start point, usually the very beginning of the session or bar one, to the same end, so they line up when dropped into a playback session. Keep the tails: a reverb that is cut off sounds worse on stage than in your headphones.
Don't put your mastering limiter on the stems. Leave some headroom and let the venue's system and engineer do their job. A stereo master squashed for streaming sounds flat and tiring through a big sound system.
Name the files so a tired engineer understands them at midnight: song title, tempo, key and stem, for example "PaperBoats_96bpm_Am_Drums."
Click and cues: for your ears only
If you play over a track with live musicians, everyone needs the same timing. Export a click track at the song's tempo, with a count-in before the first beat. Many artists also add spoken cues, a short voice saying "verse," "chorus" or "break, two, three, four," so nobody gets lost after a pause.
Click and cues go only to in-ear monitors or headphones, never to the main speakers. That is why they need their own output in your playback setup, separate from the music stems.
Formats and a simple fallback
Export uncompressed WAV files at the same sample rate and bit depth for every stem of every song, matching what your playback software and audio interface use. Mixing sample rates within one set is a classic reason for tracks drifting or playing at the wrong pitch.
Some venues, especially for short sets and club nights, only take a stereo track from a laptop or phone. For those, prepare two simple versions of each song:
- A full mix without the lead vocal.
- The same mix with backing vocals, for when you want extra support.
Listen to both in mono. Many venue systems sum the signal to mono, and a wide stereo effect can make parts disappear.
The playback rig in general terms
The setup can be as small as a phone with the stereo tracks, or a laptop running a playback session through an audio interface with several outputs: stems to the house mixing desk, click and cues to in-ears. Whatever you use, keep it boring and reliable:
- switch off notifications, automatic updates and sleep mode
- keep the whole set in one session or playlist, in show order
- bring backups: the files on a USB stick, in the cloud and on a second device
- label every cable and output, and bring your own adapters
Think of Mia Stone's first club set. She brought a laptop, one stereo cable and a phone with the same songs on it, just in case. When the laptop froze during soundcheck, the phone saved the night. It wasn't elegant, but it worked.
Rehearse with the real files
Rehearse with exactly the files you will play at the venue, in show order, at a volume close to the stage. You will hear where a stem is too loud, where a count-in is too short and where the gap between songs feels endless. Then send the files and a short note (song order, which output carries what, who to contact) to the engineer a few days before the show, not on the night.