I remember playing as member of Local 802 of the AFM in NY and the union would determine how many musicians HAD to be hired for certain rooms, based on capacity ... One of the first synth 'scandals' in my hometown was when one of the popular young band leaders started using backing tracks and hired non-musicians to stand in front of KBs and make believe they were playing ... of course the 'stand-ins' were paid about 1/3 what a musician would have made ...
Wow! Wasn't much fuss about it here in Cape Breton, but in bigger music centers the synth replacing live players(especially string players) was pretty hot stuff.
In my area we have a trio (two young female singers and a guy sax player) and they use the sequencer in one of the keyboards as a backing track source.
The sax player does most of the solos (and he is pretty good) and both girls sing and stand behind a keyboard each...strange thing is, that neither girl is actually playing the keys, but "pretending" to play...one has Local Off set on her keyboard (the one playing the tracks), and the other just has the sound way down...if you are a keyboard player, and you can manage to pay attention (both girls are gorgeous) to what their hands are doing, you can easily discern that neither is playing what is being sent out through the PA system.
It certainly doesn't seem to bother the audience (many of who are "hearing with their eyes"), and both girls also seem to feel they are doing perfectly okay "entertaining", but it does make one wonder just what listeners/spectators have come to expect.
I suppose "smoke and mirrors" are okay if you are a "magician", but what about "musicians"?
These keyboard guys(one is the composer Hans Zimmer) work it nicely with "live" players, but I suspect an arranger player into this type of music (Telmo, for instance) could pull off a reasonably decent version.
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