Backing Tracks to practice Chord progressions and Chord Theory
by Keltie Bruce Kennedy
Hi;
I have been playing guitar now for just about 6 months. The chords have been mainly open chords with a few basic Barre chords all around the first position area.
Learning songs with variety of chords and progressions becomes fine at the beginning with the help of a metronome, but soon gets very boring. I would like to spice it up a bit with very simple backing tracks of the common chord progressions.
So my question is this, "Do you know of a source or better still, how to make ones own??" This is assuming that one has the necessary software tools and hardware to do so, I have a Tascam GB-10 and a BOSS BR-80, a DAW all are great for creativity, but I want more Backing tracks to works with than they can provide. A nudge or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
The WEB has very little to help. Have searched online until sick.
Answer
Hey, here is some stuff, hope it'll be of some help:
You can use any drum tracks in place of the metronome, you can listen to a couple of them here.
If you need a backing track where a whole song except the guitar part is recorded to play it yourself (often called a minus track), they are hard to find, mostly because of the copyright issues.
I'd like to suggest you to do the following to get some useful tracks:
• 1st - you'll need a guitar tab player/editor, you can get a free one here: http://www.tuxguitar.com.ar/
• 2nd - You should get tab files of songs you'd like to play along with, the tuxguitar can open songs in its own format that has the tg file extension, as well as gp3, gp4 and gp5 (older 'guitar pro') formats that can be easily found online.
The www.ultimate-guitar.com has plenty of them, you should choose the 'guitar pro' type tabs there.
Once you are on a page with a particular tab, ignore the 'in browser tab player' and find the button that actually downloads the tab file, you might find it challenging first, it is usually located below, closer to the comment section of the page and says 'Download Guitar Pro Tab'.
• 3rd - Once you downloaded, let's say a 'xxxxx.gp4' file, open it with the tuxguitar program, press Ctrl+M to show the mixer, silence the track or tracks you want to replace with your playing by checking the 'Mute' checkbox on the mixer, and there you have it!
Note that the sound quality with this approach might be cheesy :))) It totally depends on the midi-synthesizer your sound card has, and with a generic sound card it's usually poor.
Although If you have some knowledge of a computer-based music sequencer that works with VST or LADSPA plugins, you can export a midi file from the tuxguitar, import it to the sequencer and choose some decent virtual instruments for each track.
Another thing I'd like to mention is that there's https://b-track.ru website that contains backing tracks you can listen online, many of them are cheasy too, but some I found were of really great quality.
A while ago I could download tracks from the site directly,now they ask for registration in order to make the 'download' button appear.
PS
your BOSS BR-80 multitrack recorder is perfectly capable of recording a backing track, you can just create a drum track using the preinstalled loops, then record a track or tracks above the drums yourself.
It's a great practice: playing, recording, listening and analyzing what areas of your playing need improvements.
The process of recording a track while listening to the previously recorded track(s) is called "overdubbing".