Backing Tracks Part 1

It is clear that practicing all alone without any accompagniement can be a tedious affair. It is also possible your playing is not "good enough" to step right into a band at this time, especially if you have no experience in playing with other musicians.

So what you need in fact is an "automatic" sparring partner. It is at this point that so called "backing tracks" come in to play.

Backing tracks are in fact songs, study sequences (chord progressions) etc...where one part is missing: YOU.

Backing tracks (B.T.'s) come in different formats. They can be CD's like the Aebersold series.
Aebersold Cd's exist like forever and are played by real musicians. Focus is on Jazz.

B.T.'s can also be mp3's (of course). They are often MIDI files rendered through a "better" synth than the standard windows software wavetable synth. This can be a hardware synth or a software synthesizer.

Mp3 backing tracks can be found on sites like Guitarvoice, Guitars101.com, and of course my own Pego.be.

MIDI files! The advantage of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is that one can alter the file, slow it down, mute instruments etc... The standard windows media player is not capable of that, but other players can do these things. And here is one: Van Basco Midi player.

MIDI gets a bad name because on a standard windows machine set up midi is played back by the Windows wavetable synth. That's right, MIDI is not SOUND, but commands that instruct a synth what notes to play and by what instrument they should be played. Sound quality depends on the synth used. One can greatly improve MIDI playback with the FREE midi- soundfont player synthfont, which you can find here.

For nice MIDI files I suggest you go to this yahoo group.

Some great tutorials for using synthfont are found here.

And last but not least there is a piece of software called Band In A Box. This soft generates accompagniements based on the chord names you type into a "grid". You choose a style and off you go. Of course BIAB generates midi and sounds as "bad" as your synth. I wrote a tutorial on enhancing the playback quality of BIAB at pego.be. You can read it here.

I hope this article is of some use to you.


Hugo