Dave Hum On How He Makes His Own Banjo Backing Tracks

In his own words, here's how Dave makes his own backing tracks...

The album “TRAVELLING LIGHT” is a culmination of 15 years passing. When I have had spare time between teaching, learning, busking and making videos of 5 string banjo tunes , I have recorded original compositions which have more of a unique contemporary approach.

I arrange and play all the instruments and program the beats myself - The software i use is Reason for the midi samples such as basslines, loops and effects - which lets me export as WAV files into a program called Sonar for the audio recordings - i then combine the results in Sonar - to record the actual instruments i use a Zoom H2 straight into my laptop which makes the whole process easy as it has it's own soundcard which Sonar recognises.

I enjoy many styles of music and feel that the banjo is capable of being more than a bluegrass, Celtic, ragtime or classic style instrument. Essentially, a lot of the techniques used in the Travelling Light album on the banjo are the same as the aforementioned but by giving the banjo, and mandolin for that matter, more of a contemporary rhythm and backing so to speak i think they can be used to play most styles of music if sympathetic to the emotion of the tune. —Dave Hum (from his website)

Here's the newer Zoom H2 model. There are also more advanced models of the Zoom unit, reasonably priced, that have guitar inputs. It appears that Dave recorded his musical instruments live, and not directly into the recorder. A lot of people are fascinated with Dave Hum and his banjo music, myself included. I had read in the Banjo Hangout Online (BHO) forum that Dave made his backing tracks using Reason software, so in my ignorance I went and tried it for free for 30 days at their website.

It turns out that Dave only used Reason for his MIDI portion of his recordings, and nothing else. In fact, Dave recorded his instruments with a Zoom H2 personal recorder into his laptop, using Sonar software. I'm sure a lot of people have been frustrated trying to figure out how to use Reason (now called Cakewalk) to make Dave Hum's style of backing tracks. Now you know the whole story!

By the way, the word “travelling” is not spelled wrong by Dave, in England they spell certain words different than in the United States. For example: “Arkansas Traveller”. I am very thankful to Dave and his family for sharing this information with others. I pray for Dave's family often, as I know that is what he would want, and am glad that God made Dave Hum!