Author here. Most Broadway shows have live keyboard players. There are a variety of things that can go wrong during a live show, and a live band is extremely useful in those situations. Some shows do have tracks for certain sections of the show, but most of it is played live with VSTs.

Broadway performances aren’t always trigger-able.

They may not always be performed exactly the same way ... with the exact same timing or at the same tempo or the same pauses, etc.

Yeah, when I started out with the first Intel Core Mac Mini, I bounced down most of my effects-heavy tracks, though I did this pretty begrudgingly. Fortunately Logic has a great feature where you can "Freeze" a track to a "bounced"/rendered audio file -- if you want to make edits to the effects, you can un-Freeze, make your changes and re-Freeze. Only downside is, this takes up precious time when you're trying to be creative/productive. :)

These days everyone expects to be able to just layer on 8 effects on every track but.. that's a pretty recent luxury. Back when computers weren't really powerful enough out of the box to do stuff like that you could get dedicated DSP cards like Universal Audio's "UAD-1" PCI card, which let you use really high quality effects on your tracks without overloading your CPU. Now they have newer Thunderbolt/USB-based outboard stuff to do the same thing.

Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before. It takes a while for all the third-party software vendors to update their stuff and make it run smoothly, assuming the software team is still in business or still working on that product. There's a ton of great stuff we'll never get new updates of. This is why you'll sometimes find pretty old computers in musicians' homes... There's still one cool granular synthesis app I can think of for Mac OS 8/9 (th0nk) which was never updated for anything newer, for example.

I remember seeing ProTools and other audio workstations around my city still running on old 68K Macs for years after the PPC transition because they worked, had crazy-expensive licenses, and were treated more like racked equipment than traditional computers.

Absolutely. That is more the rule than the exception for professional recording studios. Still happening, too. If you bought into many thousands of dollars of gear for Thunderbolt, for instance, or FireWire, the computer is only one small piece of that system, and becomes part of the racked equipment.

Yeah, audio/musician guys I know were using PowerMac G4 towers years into Apple's "Intel" transition. And yeah, "upgrading" means basically tossing away a perfectly good $1k piece of software and paying nearly as much for an upgrade license.

> There's still one cool granular synthesis app I can think of for Mac OS 8/9 (th0nk) which was never updated for anything newer, for example.

If they no longer plan to sell or update the software, I wonder what's to stop them from open sourcing it if asked.

Oh, they actually allow you to download it for free now, IIRC. Maybe they just figure it's so obsolete, no one would bother to port it to a newer system? To be fair you can get the same effect with newer granular synthesis software manually, th0nk was just cool in how you never knew what you're going to get out of it, leaving the result to chance.

(direct download link http://www.audioease.com/download/thOnk_0+2.sit.hqx )

> Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before.

Worse, you also can't know in advance IF your existing hardware will be supported on a new system. That has bitten me once with an E-MU 0404 USB audio interface. The fine folks at Creative never bothered to release a production driver for Vista, let alone Windows 7 or later. Needless to say, I don't buy Creative products after that.

On the Mac side, I could only imagine them getting advance news of the M1 and going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Musicians[0] (electronic and otherwise) do absolutely perform live with real-time AU/VST synths and effects.

There are some constraints on how much complexity a single machine can handle but MIDI sync, Ableton Link etc. allow to combine multiple computers and hardware synths in one setup.

Anecdotally, I don’t perform live but I write music as a hobby and I rarely if ever bounce to audio to free up RAM or CPU. I do bounce for artistic effect though (such as reversing a drum loop or shifting it up/down an octave).

[0] Like Caribou: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8s7Z3vMUGrs

It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?

I played in pit orchestras in high school and college, and it's surprising how much can change from show to show. Lots of songs have vamps (sets of four or eight bars you repeat over and over until something happens and it's time to go to the next bit), or holds, or other various other things where the conductor is paying attention to what's happening on stage to cue the musicians. You could probably rig something up in QLab or whatnot to maybe emulate that effect digitally, but it's never going to be "just hit play on the canned track."

People go to Broadway shows to see live performances, and music is a big part of it (in some shows, the biggest).

You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.

Actually, what is the reason for that? If we had computer-linked humans act a scene, then record all of their interactions, and then have them perform that ten nights in a row as live marionettes replaying their original actions from the computer, is that worse or better?

Does the potential for failure and variation attract the audience? Or just the fact that the medium is much higher fidelity: stage actors are human, three dimensional, and no other medium can record all the subtleties of motion and expression just as well.

It's not the fidelity, it's the human factor.

An concert, a play, or any other live performance is much more than a single night, 2 hour performance. It's countless hours of practice, errors, emotional up & downs during the journey.

The performance one watches is the tip of the iceberg and the underlying depth is what amazes us as humans. The unmistakable performance or real-time and invisible improvisation during the show.

I used to played in a symphony orchestra. Even the slowest of classical pieces is a storm for the orchestra, if not for the spectators.

Because then the people on stage can't react to the audience reacting. That's part of the live experience. Every live show is a bit different because every audience is different.

The reason for that is that most humans like other humans.

Variation is absolutely a huge part of the draw. Broadway fans absolutely see the same show multiple times and compare the different performances/actors.

I agree. I've only seen a couple of broadway shows, and simply seeing there were actual people playing music in the pit enhanced the whole experience (occasionally music was played on stage too in the shows I've seen).

On a side note, these broadway performers and musicians were awesome and incredibly professional and talented. I didn't know what to expect (as a kid, I found these musicals so boring) but it was great.

If it's for theatre performance, I'm guessing subtle timing is important.

Yes, this is a major reason.

Because it's a slippery slope. Before you know it, you'll be listening to material that can't be produced live.

Same reason that people hire a mediocre DJ at a wedding instead of just having a cousin operate an iPod playlist?

And what's that?

Ease and quality of improvisation? Does the musician here improvise? Slight variation in each performance?

Compare Jimi Hendrix's studio recordings, with that of his live performances.

The main song in Phantom of The Opera, in the West End, is/was done to a click track - and the performance is/was noticeably flat because of it, in my opinion.

I'd say it's the human aspect. Wedding and Broadway you go to see people live.

Otherwise why not just fire up YouTube out Spotify

Control.

All of the other answers have good points but are missing the one that matters: the musician’s union requires it. Every Broadway theatre has a minimum number of musicians (depending on the space) if a musical is being performed.