Guitar Backing Tracks

Once you have learned a few chords and scales you will by now be fairly keen to actually play something, problem is unless you can really play well, a lone guitar on its own doesn't sound like much.

Fortunately the problem can be solved with the use of a musical accompaniment played by other musicians with the lead guitar part left out so that the budding guitarist can solo over the top, this is called a backing track, and they are available for almost any style of music.

Backing tracks are an excellent learning tool for beginner guitarists, because it helps tremendously with your timing and developing phrasing, or soloing skills to a good standard on your own without having to find others to practice with, and what's more backing track recordings are easily transferred to a portable device that will play mp3 files, so they can be played anywhere you go.

In addition to the countless thousands of background tracks played by a small trio and uploaded by keen musicians, online guitar playing courses also offer dozens of professional quality recordings in all styles, that actually form part of the course structure, giving direction to your practice sessions as well as helping you progress without you realizing it, this is another major benefit of paid membership guitar training sites.

Once they can play a little, most novices generally start trying to solo over a 12-bar blues backing track in the key of A, using the A blues scale, mainly because this is one of the easiest places to play notes on the fretboard, and many different techniques and easy-to-play riffs can be used in Blues which can actually make you sound quite good, and give you confidence to play at a faster tempo or learn another key to play in such as E Blues, which is the coolest-sounding Blues key in my humble opinion.

Of course the internet is also awash with plenty of backing music for the acoustic guitar player, these are often drumless tracks, as well as those folks who have taken up the 4 string electric Bass, these tracks unsuprisingly have the lead guitar parts left in with the drum and perhaps keyboards.

For folks who's interest lies in playing rhythm guitar, rather than the lead who generally does the soloing, there are many such pieces with lead guitar left in which offer plenty of opportunity for trying out your rhythm skills.