Hey there, using background tracks can be a lot of fun. It can also add a whole
other dimension to your practice and help you work on things like improvisation and timing.
I'm going to show you how to find backing tracks for you to practice along with
and some options to create your own. Let's do it.
Hi I'm Tomas Michaud from Real Guitar Success. Now there are two main ways you might want to use
backing tracks. One is to practice chord changes and you can often find backing tracks that are
for a song that you recognize and play along with it. This helps you both to learn the song
but also helps you to get clear on the timing of the song and when to change chords. It's natural
when you're practicing on your own to kind of slow down and speed up to change chords which gets to
be a habit after a while and can be a problem. The other way to use backing tracks is sort of like as
a band to improvise with in other words to play guitar solos. I think that's a lot of fun. And
it's a great option to practice your improvisation jobs even just practicing simple scales over chord
changes helps you to start hearing how the scale fits with those type of songs or chord changes.
What's really cool there is if you can find backing tracks that also suggest what
scales might fit over those chord changes that gives you a little extra boost but I wouldn't
be afraid to experiment either and try out different things. Now I just want to mention
backing tracks are a great addition to your practice routine but just like
playing with a band it's not the same as practicing in a methodological way
including scales and exercises and other things that you need to work on slowly and consciously.
For that reason, I don't recommend using backing tracks for either all or maybe even most of your
practicing. Now there are basically three different ways to get backing tracks.
The first way to get backing tracks to practice along with is to SEARCH
FOR FREE versions. Now one option there is to look on the world wide web - Google.
At least that’s the most widely used nowadays - Google. So you’ll want to type in the search box
free backing tracks or you might wanna try to narrow it down free rock backing tracks or free
backing tracks acoustic guitar that kind of thing. You may find individual backing tracks that way
but a bigger option is to look for websites that offer free backing tracks.
One such website is called guitarbackingtrack.com and I'll put a link to that below. I haven't done
a lot of searching myself but I suspect there's quite a few more if you're willing to do the work.
Another great option is actually YouTube. YouTube is actually
one of the biggest search engines second only to Google itself
and YouTube's owned by Google. Now a lot of the YouTube videos will show up in a Google search
but I found I have much more control over searching directly in YouTube. One of the
keys is what I call the Art of Searching. Learn how to search in a way that gets better results.
I'm going to give you an example of how I would go about searching
for backing tracks on YouTube. Now you can apply all these same ideas
to searching either on the web or other sources like soundcloud which is another one I use.
So we're going to start out with going in the search of YouTube typing in something
very basic. I've pasted in backing tracks. Now you'll notice right away you get a list
of other possibilities using the terms backing tracks that might be just what you're looking for
so to start off with we're gonna just choose backing tracks but you might want
to start with one of the other ones and when I return I get - Wow! A lot of backing tracks
and fortunately most of them are around guitar that must be a popular thing.
Now I'm going to refine that a little bit. Let's try backing tracks acoustic.
I want something more sorted for acoustic guitar and sure as heck I get a bunch of
possibilities with acoustic guitar in the title and of course the picture still.
Now most of these still are what I would call jam tracks. Tracks with chord progressions that
you could practice along with but not necessarily particular songs.
Let's try, we'll add instead of acoustic let's try a band that I like. Style of Eagles
and of course you can put any band. Style of eagles brings me to a bunch of selections
of songs or at least things in the style of Eagle, some are songs. Now I see as we go along
many are backing tracks for songs,that's cool. And what's neat is they have this has a suggestion of
what scale to play along with this and even the tempo. How fast or slow it is. We got 106 beats
per minute. Well, let's see. Let's say you're looking for a particular song. Let's try that.
Instead of backing track style let's put, I'll put the song Peaceful Easy Feeling. How about that?
Eagle songs just came to mind since we're looking at Eagles. And sure as heck, there's a whole bunch
of backing tracks for Peaceful Easy Feeling. Of course you'd have to check them out and see
which ones are more like what you're looking for. Look at a bluegrass backing track for Peaceful
Easy Feeling. That's cool. I'll bet you there's a bunch of stuff in there. I could be here all day.
Anyway, try to have fun with it and try different things to see what you come up with. Over time,
you'll collect these backing tracks and have a bunch of things you can use.
Another great source is soundcloud.com. Now this is a source that allows independent artists to
put their songs on the website and they can charge for them but a lot of them are free. It so happens
that I put a lot of backing tracks on soundcloud. You'll find the same techniques that you use
for YouTube work on soundcloud. Depending on your search, you can narrow it down so you
don't have to look through and listen to hundreds of songs. Well free backing tracks can work fine.
If you want a higher quality and you want to save time with searching you'll probably want
to go to a website that you can purchase backing tracks. One such website is karaoke-version.com
then you'll want to search specifically for guitar backing tracks. They have backing tracks for all
instruments and they'll remove either the vocals or melody instruments or sometimes the chords
if you want to try going directly there. I often find for myself that even though I'd love to get
something for free, that paying a little bit extra to get something that really works for
what I'm doing it's well worth it in the long run. Let me know in the comments if you know some good
places to search for either backing tracks that are free or ones that you can purchase
Another way to get backing tracks and my personal favorite is to make your
own backing tracks and there are a lot of ways to do that. One way is to use a free
program called audacity. You can find a song that you want to play and sing along with.
Put it into audacity and then with a little tweaking remove the vocal. You can also try
removing the lead guitar if you want to try improvising with the song though it removes vocals
better than it seems to remove lead guitar. I’ll put the link below so you can get that software.
I’m going to show you an example of how I go about removing the vocal part using audacity.
Okay, here we have the audio that I’ve put into the audacity dashboard
and I’m going to select a portion of the audio to work on. In this case, I’ll go from here to
here. I know there’s vocals in this part and let’s play it and see what it sounds like.
Okay, we’ve got a nice male vocal. Now to remove that vocal, audacity makes it realy
easy. We’re going to go to the effects down to vocal remover. Now you have several options here.
Remove vocals and you have a few options here. Remove frequency band or retain. I find the best
result for me just comes from simple entire spectrum and usually I leave this where it's
set. I did a little tweaking and i'm not sure if I left it exactly but this works fine 200 to 8,000.
Now we're going to preview and see what it sounds like without the vocals.
Not bad and to save that you go to OK and now it's changed that part
to be the instrumental pretty much. I hear just of the vocals left over.
You can also make backing tracks using Garage Band or another DAW that stands
for Digital Audio Workstation such as work stations include Sonar, Cubase, Logic pro
and many others. This could be fairly involved or
fairly simple depending on how complicated of a backing track you want and your skill level
with music in general. I’m going to put a link to a wonderful lesson that another YouTuber made
on the whole process and how he goes about making a backing track. I think you'll enjoy it. That
said because it takes a lot of time to actually create it within my … I used sonar as a DAW.
I do sometimes create backing tracks that way more often because I'm a bit lazy and time is an issue.
I use a program called Band in a Box or abbreviated to BIAB which is a common
abbreviation. This is an incredible program that allows me to choose a style, put in the chords
and choose the key even change keys if I'm not happy with that key and then I can play the whole
thing back and I'll add the bass drums and other instruments. I can change different instruments if
I want. It's great and they have several versions ranging some fairly affordable to really high-end
ones. Within Band-in-a-Box, there's two ways to go about making a backing track. You can just make it
from scratch. Basically you find the chord changes that you want. You put them into the measures in
Band in a Box. Choose a style, a tempo, the key, all that and then you play it back and when you're
happy, download it into a file. Another way to do that is to find a MIDI track online and
upload it into Band-in-a-Box then it puts in all the chord changes and suggests the instruments.
I'm going to make a video to demonstrate how I use Band-in-a-Box
using the by scratch method which is how I used to go about it and I'll put a link
when I do so you can watch how that works or you could just go out and buy Band-in-a-Box
and start experimenting. There are plenty of tutorial videos on YouTube so you can get going.
Hey thanks for hanging out with me today.
If you got something out of this video, give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel so you
don't miss anything. Have you found some ways to get backing tracks that I didn't mention?
I'd love to know about it. Let us know in the comments below so we can all share in
and I'd love to hear from you too if you found either making your own or using Band-in-a-Box
has been a lot of fun. Let us know. I'll see you again in another video hopefully soon. Bye.