Pros and Cons of Backing Tracks vs. Live Musicians
Ah, yes—the age-old debate: should you use a pre-recorded backing track or hire live musicians for your musical theatre production? I've often been asked which I prefer and what works best in different situations. My answer remains the same: it depends!
Let’s dive into the pros and cons of backing tracks and live musicians and explore how each option might fit your production. A few variables to consider when making this decision are:
Theatre Venue
Cost
Time
Resources
Adaptability
These factors are interconnected and often overlap, but let’s break them down and see how they influence your choice.
1. Theatre Venue
Not all theatres, companies, or venues are equal in budget or physical space. Black box theatres, high schools, regional venues, and Broadway stages all differ significantly in layout, budgets, personnel, and limitations.
Take a community theatre venue without space for a pit in front of the stage, for example. Musicians may need to be placed in the wings or, if the venue has the technology, perform live in a remote location and feed the audio into the sound system. Most venues cannot accommodate pits larger than 10–14 players, limiting the physical space required for musicians, music stands, instruments, and other equipment.
In my experience, I’ve often seen pits placed behind the set, in the wings, or at the front of the stage when space allows. Remote pits, while innovative, come with their own challenges—timing delays between musicians and the cast, technical issues with monitoring systems, and, of course, budgetary constraints for this setup.
2. Cost
As Cabaret reminds us, money does make the world go 'round. Budget is a significant factor when deciding between live musicians and backing tracks.
Let’s use a community theatre production of Mary Poppins as an example:
Total budget: $10,000
Ticket price: $25
Capacity: 250 seats
The budget includes sets, licensing rights, costumes, stipends for staff (music director, director, choreographer, lighting operator, sound operator), and other miscellaneous expenses. For a typical community theatre run—1 tech week and 6 performances over 2 weekends—the remaining budget for musicians would be $1,300 given the breakdown.
In New Jersey, pit musicians earn $50–$125 per service (rehearsal, sitzprobe, or performance). With $1,300, you can hire 1–3 players at most, in addition to the music director. The MTI Mary Poppins offers a 16-piece and 11-piece orchestration which is too much for this budget.
A more affordable option is to purchase pre-recorded tracks from Music Theatre International (MTI) for $750, which includes up to 10 performances for venues under 499 seats. While these tracks are pre-recorded, according to MTI, "they are performed by LIVE musicians", offering a polished sound without exceeding the budget.
3. Time
Time is another key factor, especially for non-Broadway productions. Licensing companies like MTI, Concord, and TRW often ship orchestration books too late for music directors to distribute and hire musicians. While some companies are starting to provide digital parts, this isn’t yet universal.
Additionally, there may not be enough time for musicians to learn the material or to secure their availability for the run. Tracks eliminate these time constraints, as they’re ready to use immediately upon licensing.
4. Resources
Certain areas may lack the resources to pull together a full pit orchestra. On the East Coast, for instance, you have access to a wealth of musicians in New York City, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In more rural regions, finding skilled players can be challenging.
Some theatres also lack basic resources, such as music stands or stand lights, which are essential for live musicians. In such cases, pre-recorded tracks become a practical alternative.
5. Adaptability
Outside of the business and physical reasons, the ability to pivot an orchestra to an actors performance is impossible with pre-recorded tracks; especially in educational and amateur productions. There have been times I've seen an actor lose which count they were in for a vamp and ended up jumping several bars in the music because they panicked. As a music director, you can steer the orchestra to jump and catch the performer in cases like this. However, the track is locked-in to a tempo, timing, vamps, keys, and is very inflexible.
Although, MTI and the tracks can be modified to the production, it does take time and the performers are still locked into a set way they have to perform. This can be a benefit when working with children and younger productions as they are concrete learners and having consistent and predictable tracks can actually aide them in performing better as they can practice at home to what they will certainly get on stage.
There is no one-shoe-size-fits-all when it comes to making this decision on whether or not to use tracks. I didn't go into Broadway or professional settings in this post as they have union contracts that require them to hire a certain number of musicians from the union depending on the size of the theatre and the collective bargaining agreement between the AFM and the venues.
I will mention, though, that the Broadway musical Here Lies Love was in production and planned to use only pre-recorded tracks. This caused a major issue between the producers and the union, to which they eventually changed course and was required to hire 19 musicians from the AFM Local 802 union. You can read more about that story here on Playbill.
The landscape is changing and as technology and recording becomes even more seamless, we will certainly be seeing these trends break into the Broadway circuit. At the end of the day, live musicians will never be able to be replaced and there is always a human on the other end of the instrument; even if it is pre-recorded or sampled.