Lots of customers have asked about ways to keep music flowing between songs and for this we’ve built in some transition pad sounds. Controls are below the Play, Stop and Rewind buttons.
Clicking the left hand volume up button slowly swells in a pad sound in the key of the song currently being played. As the player sets up the next song in the playlist, if it is in a different key to the outgoing song, you have the option of pressing the crossfade (X) button in the middle. This will crossfade a new pad in the key of the upcoming song. You can start the new song at any time and when you’re ready, press the volume down button to the right of the crossfade button, which will slowly fade the pad sound out.
Overall volume control for the pads is on a little horizontal slider directly underneath the crossfade and swell buttons.
The Worship Backing Band Transition Player is designed so that you can set up two independent mixes for front-of-house and fold back directly from your Mac, PC or iPad’s standard stereo output. To do this, plug a mini-jack to RCA or mini-jack to ¼ inch cable into your device’s headphone output and into two channels of your mixing desk.
How to start and stop songs, loop and jump song sections
Start a song by hitting the big circular play button.
The song time line at the bottom shows the current section being played in red. If you want to repeat that section touch it once, it will turn blue and automatically loop once and carry on with the song as normal.
If you want to jump to another section touch the song section you want to go to and it will jump to it when the current section finishes.
If you press and hold any song section it will give options to loop that section once or twice or skip the section all together – allowing you to pre-set a new arrangement before you play the song.
How to set up pre-cued jumps and loops in advance
To pre-arrange a song flow arrangement by skipping or repeating sections use the pop-up from the song section bar by clicking and holding. If you click ‘Save Mix” this arrangement info is saved for that song, and if you click ‘Load Mix’ your previously saved settings for that song are retrieved.
Saved information includes mix and solo/mute settings, skips/repeats, key, and tempo.
Any midi controller can be set up to control the player. We’d recommend a minimum of three buttons to control playing/starting songs and jumping forwards or backwards on the song timeline. For cable-free operation Bluetooth foot controllers like the IK iRig Blueboard (Mac and iPad) and the Positive Grid BT4 (Bluetooth for iPad only) can work well.
Any simple MIDI USB pedal should work including the Behringer-FCB1010 midi foot controller (Mac, PC MIDI cable) and the ActitioN 8 button METAL USB MIDI controller (for Mac and PC) plus a separate pedal such as the Thomann volume and expression pedal.
Note that these are not our products so we are unable to provide in-depth technical support for their use. This video shows the IK iRig Blueboard.
The first step to use any MIDI controller is to get it connected to your device either via a cable or using Bluetooth. With this controller the connection is made via it’s own app. You will need to follow the manufacturer’s instructions for your controller.
Once you’ve got your controller connected you’ll need to ensure that it’s sending program changes and not control changes – again, you’ll need to do this in a third party app. Use this app to select a MIDI channel. We’ll use channel 01. Once these steps are complete you can open the Worship Backing Band player. From here, the steps should be the same for all devices.
Open the settings screen and select Pedal Control.
Select the tick box for MIDI on the right hand side of the screen, and slide the number wheels next to the tick box to match the MIDI channel you selected in your MIDI control app – in this case, chanel 01.
Press one of the foot switch buttons on your iRig foot controller (e.g. the A button). The button should light up blue.
Then on the Worship Backing Band app press the square ‘soft’ button directly to the left of the command you would like the footswitch to perform (e.g. Back Up Section). It you want more choices, click the text with the command and pop up a menu will appear.
After you press the soft button, the small white number wheels next to the command should change to show the MIDI command assigned to that action. As you press the footswitch repeatedly, the soft button should light on and off to confirm that button is assigned.
Repeat these steps for your remaining footswitches. If you’ve got 4 pedals, our preferred choices are:
Button A – Back Up Section
Button B – Start/Loop Playback
Button C – Advance Section
Button D – Group Mute On/Off
Test that the foot controller and the Worship Backing Band app are communicating by dragging a song into the playlist area and using the footswitch buttons to control the functions you’ve chosen.
If you have one or more expression pedals plugged into or on your MIDI controller, you can assign these in a similar manner.
Worship Backing Band will save your settings. When you restart, remember to run your MIDI control app in the background, and then run the Worship Backing Band app.
You need to buy the Transition Player from the Worship Backing Band website where you can also buy tracks. The iPad Player is purchased from the App Store.
On the website go to the Song List tab to see a complete list of tracks together with links to each.
The Buy Tracks tab will also take you to the songs with a short description of each.
You can also search alphabetically or by track name.
Click on the song you’re interested in and you can listen to a 30 second sample to make sure it’s the right one and in a style that suits you.
Be sure to buy MultiTracks, NOT Split Tracks.
Click the ‘Buy MultiTrack’ button and add it to your basket and go through the purchase process.
Once you’ve purchased, click on the ‘My Downloadable Products’ button in My Account or on the link that will have been emailed to you.
You’ll then see a link called “Download track for Worship Backing Band iPad or Transition Players”
You only need the full studio wav files if you are using a DAW such as Ableton or our OLD MultiTrack Player. DO NOT import these wavs to the iPad or the Transition Player.
You will download the zip file onto your Mac/PC. The file will remain in zip file format, and there is never a need to unzip them. On a Mac, you may want to disable the feature that automatically unzips downloaded content.
Open the Transition Player. Once the song is downloaded drag the zip file to the player or alternatively to the library folder shortcut on your desktop created during installation.
Transition/iPad tracks are compressed in a high quality audio format so they still sound great but are much smaller in size than the full studio WAV versions which you also get as part of your purchase.These are around 40mb to 70 each so take up less room on your device than the full wavs.
The audio is compressed by the importer into OGG Vorbis at quality 6, equivalent to 320 Megabit Per Second MP3s, the same quality used for audio CD distribution. This is more than sufficient quality.
If you have previously purchased MultiTracks from us you can get the compressed audio variants here without having to re-purchase them.
This video will show you how to import your own MultiTracks or those you have purchased from third party sites. You don’t need to watch this video if you only ever use Worship Backing Band MultiTracks.
You can import zipped WAVs, MP3s or AAC files to the Transition Player. The stems do not need to be identical lengths but the length of the longest stem will determine the length of the full song.
You’ll find that the Worship Backing Band player interface is the same on Windows, Mac and iPad except for Edit Mode. Edit Mode is not on iPad
You’ll then be shown (and emailed) a link to download the Player. This is also stored in My Account/My Downloadable Products on the webstore.
Click the Mac or PC link to download. If you see a warning message (eg Windows Defender SmartScreen message) please overrule the message. On Windows you do this by clicking More info and then Run anyway.
On Mac if you get a warning message about malicious software please follow this link https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 (look at the bottom of the article) and add an exception for the MultiTrack player. An alternative route is to go to the macOS User Guide for Catalina. Go to Table of contents > Privacy and Security > Protect Your Mac from Malware > Open an app by overriding security settings.
You will then be taken through a download process. Simply click to proceed as you would with any new software.
When you open the Player you’ll see the player window. This is re-sizeable by the user but always maintains the same aspect ratio (4/3). On a Mac, it you make it full screen, it will resize to a different aspect, but the basic relationship of the elements to each other remains, just with a bit more space in between. On Windows, the aspect is always constrained to the 4/3 aspect ratio.
If you are working on an iPad you need to purchase a separate app from the App Store.
The free track for June is Hillsong’s You Hold Me Now by Matt Crocker and Reuben Morgan. Click to download the song which has a full set of WAVs (+ Ableton session file) as well as stems for our iPad Player.
Unless you are confident with using a DAW such as Ableton, you will need a copy of Worship Backing Band’s Mac/PC or iPad MultiTrack Player to play the backing track. MultiTrack is the simplest and least expensive solution to get a full band sound from your worship team, even if you’ve only got a couple of musicians.
Free Worship Backing Band MultiTrack for April 2019
This month’s free MultiTrack is the CompassionArt song So Great written by a huge team of well known songwriters including Michael W Smith, Paul Baloche, Steven Curtis Chapman, Stu Gerrard, Israel Houghton, Tim Hughes, Graham Kendrick, Amy Park, Matt Redman, and Chris Tomlin.
The CompassionArt charity was founded by Delirious? songwriter Martin Smith and his wife Anna, with the aim of generating income from works of art to assist in the relief of suffering around the world.
Unless you are confident with using a DAW such as Ableton, you will need a copy of Worship Backing Band’s Mac/PC or iPad MultiTrack Player to play the backing track. MultiTrack is the simplest and least expensive solution to get a full band sound from your worship team, even if you’ve only got a couple of musicians.
We have compiled a list of 82 songs suitable for Easter services that we have available as MultiTracks and Split Tracks. Click the song to take you to listen to a sample or to buy.
Remember bulk buy discounts are automatically applied at the checkout for purchases of 10, 25 and 50 tracks.
