Musical jargon is full of specific words and expressions. Some of them, such as “warm tube sound” or “labukh” (a slang term for a gigging musician), have firmly entered the everyday speech of people far from music, while others are just preparing to become part of the vocabulary and require clarification. Karaoke fans are well aware of the term “karaoke minus” or “backing track”. Let’s take a detailed look at what kind of beast this is and how to tame it.
Music Without Vocals
When the first minus track appeared is not known for certain. Already in the 1920s and 30s, records were released featuring the melodies of popular songs without the vocal recording. They were intended for home singing with the family. With the development of television, backing tracks migrated to music shows. We covered this in quite some detail in the article “The Evolution of Karaoke.” In the 60s, American television broadcast the show Sing Along with Mitch, which combined music with lyrics at the bottom of the screen so that viewers could sing along while watching.
Backing tracks turned out to be highly in demand among artists wishing to achieve a perfect performance at any venue under any conditions, without depending on random circumstances. The flip side of the coin was the emergence of “plus” tracks—recordings with the vocals included—where the performer simply lip-syncs on stage. While singing to a minus track was accepted normally by the audience, the “plus” track still provokes fierce debate today.
On the one hand, lip-syncing (or “fanera” as it’s known in Russian slang) made life noticeably easier for artists who actively move around the stage and dance; on the other hand, it doesn’t look entirely fair, since the audience paid money for a live performance, not to listen to an album recording, even if played on powerful concert equipment. The backing track gained a new life with the advent of karaoke. The minus track and the lyrics on the screen seemed to be waiting for someone to come up with the idea of combining them into a single whole.
Backing Tracks and Karaoke
The more complex karaoke systems became, the higher the quality of karaoke songs. The very first backing tracks were synthesized cover versions of popular compositions. Over time, simple minus tracks encoded in MIDI format were replaced by studio tracks with professional arrangements recorded by professional musicians, as well as licensed originals provided by copyright holders. In essence, the difference between the music sounding on an artist’s album and the backing track on a karaoke system has completely disappeared.
Karaoke manufacturers generally prefer to develop their own file formats. This allows them to achieve their goals in terms of track quality and pitch modulation, and it also prevents the theft and resale of song databases—decrypting the file might not be profitable enough to bother with.
A karaoke track consists of:
- A backing track / minus track (mp3, ogg, wav, aac, and other audio formats)
- Synchronized lyrics (txt, midi, xml, etc.)
Common karaoke file formats include:
- MIDI. Contains a description of the melody (which is then synthesized by a synthesizer) and lyrics tied to the timing. However, the quality of these songs depends very heavily on the synthesizer that actually produces the sound.
- CD+G (MP3+G). This format is popular in the West. Initially, CD+G was used on CDs, where the lyrics on the screen were drawn using raster graphics consisting of only 16 colors and having a very low resolution. Modern implementations of MP3+G have better quality but still have many limitations.
- KFN. This format has been significantly popularized in Europe. Not least because many third-party PC applications have “learned” to play it.
Studio Evolution uses its own EK2 file format, developed specifically for Evolution karaoke systems. It is one of the most advanced formats currently available, including:
- An original studio-quality backing track.
- Lyrics synchronized not only by time but also indicating pitch, which allows for real-time scoring of the singing.
- Separate tracks with LiveFX effects.
- A separate vocal part track.
Sometimes a minus track without a lead voice in karaoke is supplemented with backing vocals. This gives the performance a real concert scale. Along with the performer, several voices or even a whole stadium energetically joining in the chorus can be heard in the background. Previously, achieving such sound was only possible in a high-class karaoke club with backing vocalists, musicians, and a professional sound engineer. Now, thanks to modern Studio Evolution backing tracks and LiveFX, a concert show will sound right in your living room.
The name karaoke comes from the Japanese words “empty” and “orchestra”. Depending on the context, karaoke can mean a type of entertainment venue, singing to a backing track, or the device for playing the track itself. But whatever the context, we always imagine a microphone, the bright light of a screen with lyrics, and a festive atmosphere. So what exactly is karaoke?
