Why You Should Use Backing Tracks
Backing Tracks have been popular practice tools for guitarists for a long time. Many players in the formative years of electric guitar would learn their favourite songs by ear and play along to the record as closely as possible. This is a priceless practice and the benefits of playing along to your favourite songs are almost endless. For it is as close to playing with a real band as possible. Since then, we have been lucky to get backing tracks to our favourite songs, minus guitar track, so we can hone our skills and really check out how we’re playing. We also have access to huge wells of generic backing tracks to sharpen our improvisation skills on guitar. In this short blog, I want to state some of the benefits of using backing tracks in our practice and also some things to ‘try’ to get the most out of your guitar practice with backing tracks.
Using Song Backing Tracks to Tighten Your Performance.
Playing along to the original recording is great for ensuring that you have the right parts down, the timing and tone etc. But at some point, it's healthy to go without the support of the original guitar part, playing along to a BT with your part taken out is great fun. This way you take the driver's seat of the guitar part for the song, recording yourself playing along is great practice as well. On listening back, you can see where in your performance you’re nailing it or bailing it. Recording and listening back to your practice is the quickest and most effective way of knowing ‘what’ to practice. Maybe I keep fluffing up a chord change or rushing a riff, I can go back to that in the woodshed, work on it, and come back to the performance. These kinds of changes are often simple, but make huge differences to our overall playing.
Backing Tracks to Work On Your Improvisation/Soloing
Maybe one of the most popular uses of backing tracks is to practice our soloing with them. We put on the track and wail away. This can be therapeutic however, I have some warnings and pointers.
First of all, most improvised guitar solos don’t last 8 minutes like some of the backing tracks do. Often a solo will take place over a section or two of the arrangement or there will be a 4 to 8 bar break in a song for a lead. Noodling on endlessly can create bad habits in our improvisation, we end up practising the ‘endless noodle’ which makes our phrasing aimless and our solo trajectory watery in consistency. My advice is to focus on each section of the backing track, either in sections or in bars depending on the style of track. Give yourself 8 bars to develop a cool solo, use limitations to ‘squeeze’ out the creativity and phrases. If you’re working on a new scale/arpeggio or technique, you can use the limitation of your ‘8 bars’ to practice blending that in with stuff you can already do. This is a much more musical way of practising with backing tracks which I’d argue is much more satisfying and musical.
A note on Rhythm Sections:
I was watching a masterclass by the amazing Andy Wood, he was talking about the subject of backing tracks for improvisation. He asked the question along the line of “does anyone feel like a worse player after playing along to some YouTube guitar backing tracks” to which everyone, including myself put their ‘zoom’ hand up. He argued that the use of Midi, whilst brilliant, when the whole backing track is quantised, it leads to a stiff feel which can be hard to get any ‘vibe’ from. Quantisation is where everything is locked into a grid, its ‘perfectly’ in time, at least idealistically. However, humans don’t perform like that, part of what makes us move is the slight dissonance of time.
When we play with real musicians, we feed off each other subconsciously, if we’re truly listening, we are responding to what’s going on around us, much like a conversation. The music keeps to a tempo and great musicians can play around with that tempo, it’s a climbing frame to be explored. But if the backing track is locked into ‘perfect’ time has no air to it, it can be like talking to a wall and not very inspiring at all. A small caveat to this however is that some styles of music work well when they are quantised, trance, techno, dance, modern pop, it has a certain quality to it and isn’t a bad thing. But I think as Andy pointed out earlier, it's an important distinction to be aware of when we are workout out of its ‘us’ or the backing track.
I often make my own backing tracks and I have been guilty of quantising everything perfectly out of laziness, and often wondered why I found certain backing tracks so ‘dry’. Since then, I’ve been working on getting a live feel in my programming or using live drum loops as much as possible and building the track from there to get a human feel. At least this way we have more of a chance of getting inspired by what we’re playing along to.
Create your own damn backing tracks!
On the subject of programming, I think its healthy for all guitarists to have a go at making their own backings. After all, creating music is what playing guitar is all about. We can learn much more about our instrument and musicianship by creating music beyond the guitar itself. We can create our own ‘worlds’ to explore the sounds we love, this enables us to find out for ourselves what we sound like, what is authentic, what isn’t, what we want to add or even better, take away from our playing to become more actualised in our expression as artists.
It has also become much easier to have a home studio set up, just a laptop, interface and a few plug ins and you can create decent backing tracks. You might even get carried away and make a great album, let's hope so!
