How To Create Accompaniment Tracks For Your Live Performances

I was just recently asked to perform at a hotel in The Dominican Republic for a week and happily accepted (yay free vacation!). But I also knew that I wanted to leave a great impression so that they would ask me to come back. So I knew that I needed to step up my live performance game as up until this point I had only ever sang and played keyboard to accompany myself (or full band).

This is why I decided to look into creating tracks that I could use to accompany me, in addition to playing keyboard - I didn’t just want this to be glorified karaoke after all. After a lot of trial and error I found all the right tools and developed an efficient system so that I could create these backing tracks quickly.

Stems - The Secret To Making This Work

The goal with these tracks is not to just sing along to a karaoke track and call it a day (you can do that, but that’s not what we’re going for her). What I wanted to do what find a way to have drums and bass play, but none of the other instruments so that I can play keyboard and sing together with the track and get a full, yet still live sound.

This is where Stems come into play. A stem is basically just one instrument isolated from. So you can have a stem for the keyboard, a stem for the bass, a stem for the drums, a stem for the vocals, etc. Often times you’ll find that one instrument actually has multiple stems, but for what we’re doing here one stem per instrument is plenty.

Having the stems of a song allows you to mute specific instruments in a song, allowing you to create track with only certain instruments playing! Let’s say you’re a drummer - you probably want the drums muted but the rest of the song still playing. When you have the stems you can easily just mute the drum and keep everything else on. In my case I wanted to only keep the drums and the bass parts and mute everything else as I’ll be laying Keyboard myself and I still wanted to have a live feeling, not fully produced tracks.

So the question is how do you get these stems so that you can puzzle these songs together however you want? It’s actually a lot easier that you’d think…

Moises - The Hero Of Tracks

Moises is an app that I have used for years, but not necessarily to make tracks for live performances, but to create karaoke tracks for songs that didn’t already have a karaoke track on YouTube for myself and for our students. This then got me thinking that I can use this app for creating backing tracks as well!

Here’s how it works - Moises takes an audio file of a song and uses AI to split it into the different stems. You can tell it how many instruments you want it to single out. So for me I told it to separate the vocals, keys, guitar, drums, and bass. Once it has analyzed the file you can see all the different stems and mute them all individually. Now all you gotta do is just decide on which stems you want on and which ones you want off and boom, you’re done!

Moises has a free trial, but I definitely recommend upgrading to the paid version. It’s incredibly affordable for the power it has. You can check it out here: https://moises.app/lara

If you don’t know how to get an MP3 track for the song you’re trying to create stems for, I recommend getting MediaHuman. It allows you to download the audio file of any YouTube video. You can then take that file and import it into Moises.

Customizing Your Track

It’s very rare for me to sing a song in the original key… So is there a way to change the key of a song? Yes! Moises doesn’t just let you separate an audio file into different stems, but it also allows you to change the key AND tempo of any song! That way you can create your own versions of those songs and make them fit your vocal range perfectly.

You can also further customize a track by using a DAW like GarageBand, Logic Pro X, Pro Tools and similar. There you can cut out certain parts of a song (like if you don’t want to sing the last chorus 3 times, but only twice you can cut the last chorus) or add more to it (doing a chorus twice instead of just once for example). This allows you to change the song structure.

Inside a DAW the customization options are limitless… But that already goes into production, which is above my pay grade haha! The best I can do is add a shaker or claps from the loop library inside Logic Pro X.

Add An Intro

One thing that gets often overlooked when creating tracks is forgetting to add an intro to your track. This could be a simple 4 beat count in for example. If you’re accompanying yourself on keyboard or guitar together with those tracks you need to know when exactly to come in. If you press play and then you have to find the chord with your fingers first you will have long missed the cue. So I would recommend adding a simple intro to the track to make sure you’re not missing any cues. You can do that inside any DAW.

You Have The Track - Now What?

I filmed myself going through the entire process of creating a track from start to finish AND what I then do with this track.

I like to use the app Stage Traxx 3 to create set lists and use the app for my performances. There you can upload the lyrics, chord progressions and your tracks.

🎧 Check out the whole process and see my setlist live in action here!

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