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What are guitar backing tracks?

What are guitar jam tracks? What are guitar backing tracks?

The term is interpreted in different ways. We divide them into three groups

  1. The backing ‘JAM’ tracks that you can find on guitartonemaster.com are pieces of music of various difficulty levels that give you the opportunity to jam & to get to know your instrument better. 
  2. A backing track may also indicate a music sample an artist/band uses in a piece of music, to give the song more dimensions or to make it easier to bring more difficult pieces live.
  3. The term backing track is also used as accompanying music from existing songs where one of the instruments has been omitted. So in guitar backing tracks the guitar parts are omitted, with bass backing tracks the bass parts, etc. These tracks can help you learn how to play a piece of music. Learning to play a solo with the accompaniment underneath is easier and more fun.

1. Backing ‘JAM’ tracks

Essentially, a jam track is a backing track, with pre-recorded parts such as drums, bass, keys or other guitars.

There are many useful resources online (Spotify, Youtube, Soundcloud, apps) and offline (books, CDs & DVDs). 
At GuitarToneMaster we try to bundle all channels in an immense database. With our advanced filters, you find instantly the right backing track. Sort by key, genre or use one of the many more filter options.

GuitarToneMaster.com | Guitar | Bass | Drum

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Best YouTube Channels with lots of Backing Tracks

  1. Nick Neblo
  2. Tom Bailey Backing Tracks
  3. Quistjam
  4. Tomas Sandanus
  5. Sébastien Zunino
  6. NCTracks
  7. RawJamTracks
  8. Etienne De Loirol

The musicians above also have a GuitarToneMaster Channel. Find out more backing track composers!

Why practice with backing tracks?

In this section, we focus on backing ‘JAM’ tracks. These tracks consist of a simple chord scheme. Which makes it easy to play with and to delve into chords, scales, arpeggios & modes. On GuitarToneMaster we help you with chords, scales & modes suggestions.
Many beginner guitarists dream of playing music with other people. Unfortunately, they mostly find themselves honing their skills by themselves, often strumming on the six strings in their bedrooms. Practicing guitar on your own is very important. It is a good way to become more familiar with the instrument, as well as learning about the ins and outs of your technique. However, you might miss out on a lot of amazing benefits by playing without any form of accompaniment.

If having a drummer and a bass player to accompany you isn’t feasible, guitar jam tracks are the next best thing! Essentially, a jam track is a backing track, with pre-recorded parts such as drums, bass, keys, maybe even vocals or other guitars.

These guitar jam tracks usually follow a specific tempo and key, as well as a given genre, scale or style. They are designed to help guitarists learn more “in context.”
When you play music in an ensemble (a band, for example), you won’t just be playing random notes. You must learn how to follow a pattern dictated by key and tempo changes. 

Playing along to a guitar backing track is a great way to learn how to stay within those lines as a guitar player. At first, improvising to a jam track can sound difficult or nerve-racking, but the more you do it, the more you’ll feel comfortable and enable your expressiveness to shine through!

Think of it as being a painter: In order to draw a cool picture, you need to know the size of your canvas first!

Guitar jam tracks can help you improve your creativity, help you refine your knowledge of scales, and more. In addition to that, playing to a backing track is a lot of fun, and it can help you come up with new riffs and ideas to use for your own compositions if you are interested in writing your own music.  There are many jam tracks for guitarists available online, in pretty much all genres and keys. From rock to blues, psychedelic, and jazz, anything goes. Most of the backing tracks for guitar players out there are recorded really well, and it’s easy to jam along with them, as well as understanding any tempo and key fundamentals.

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2. Music Sample

Bands or solo musicians may use these backing tracks to add extra instrumental, samples or vocal tracks to give more color to their live performances. On GuitarToneMaster you ain't gonna find samples, but maybe following resources will help you.

Resources for samples

  1. Splice
  2. Musicradar
  3. Samples.landr

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3. Music from existing songs

In these backing tracks, the guitar parts are omitted (with bass backing tracks the bass parts, etc.). These tracks can help you learn how to play a piece of music. Want to nail the chords of melody from a popular song, you can use accompanying backing tracks to jam-a-long.

Resources for backing tracks

  1. Karaoke-version
  2. Guitarbackingtrack

The Best Free Guitar and Bass Tabs website
Before diving in to play your favorite guitar songs with guitar backing tracks maybe you want to take the time to look at tabs or chords. Here is our list of search engines for finding guitar chords and guitar tabs.

  1. Songsterr
  2. Ultimate Guitar
  3. Chordie

Think we missed something?

Get in touch with us or comment below, we are always interested in finding new resources for our community.
 

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