Backing tracks are a great way to improve your guitar playing. They will help you improve your scale knowledge, technique, tone, and your sense of rhythm. Also, it's a lot more fun than practicing with only a metronome. Jam sessions are the right place where you can take all the scales, arpeggios, and licks you're working on, and put them to use.
How to Practice with Backing Tracks?
Just simply improvise and solo over the tracks as much as you want or you can practice your scales and arpeggios with whole, half, quarter, eighth notes, etc. Use the different tempos to help you get faster and improve your technique. Also, improvise using the individual scales. This will help you hear the differences between each scale. Backing tracks are also a great tool if you want to work on some melodies!
When you jam, pay attention to the vibe or feel of each scale when played over the backing track. Once you add these to your vocabulary, you can use those differences in tonal qualities to add flavor to your improvisations. Getting comfortable with recognizing how different scales sound over tracks will make it much easier for you to identify scales when you hear them in songs you’re listening to. This will really help your ability to figure out melodies and solos you hear in your favorite tunes!
Fretello Backing Track Catalog
To demonstrate the concept of practicing over these backing tracks, we just launched a backing track catalog. The catalog comes with more than 7000 different backing track combinations from pop, rock, blues and heavy & metal you can jam to. You can use the backing tracks at the various tempos as your skills build.
You can start your own jam session right now, and the best thing: It's completely free.