Learning to play a musical instrument is difficult. It requires time, dedication, and a lot of practice. To get the most out of each practice session, it’s wise to include a variety of exercises to challenge your musical intuition. One of the best tools many new musicians overlook is to practice with a backing track. This week, we’re looking at how practicing with backing tracks can be useful and help you become a better musician.

What are Backing Tracks?

Backing tracks are songs specifically designed for musicians to practice by playing along with. These pieces of music can be as simple as a drum loop or as complex as the entire song – minus the part you’re playing.

What’s more, musicians use backing tracks for a variety of reasons. Whether you’re new to music or have enjoyed it your entire life, here are a few ways to use backing tracks to improve your practice time.

A More Interesting Metronome

An old-fashioned click track is a handy tool. But listening to that click or beep tick off the moments for hours can be exhausting and draining. So, instead of the tired old metronome, why not try a backing track?

The entire point of using a metronome is to learn to play in time with a drummer. Playing with a drum track or an even more robust backing track does the same thing but in a more exciting and entertaining way.

Get a feel for Rhythms & Genres

One of the more interesting benefits of playing with a backing track is that the experience helps take you beyond simply learning to play in time. Playing with a variety of backing tracks can help you develop a feel for different rhythms and genres.

Using backing tracks with different rhythms and from different genres allows you to develop your musical intuition more fully, making you a better player and priming you to play with a broader group of musicians.

Time Signatures

One of the shortcomings of traditional metronomes is that they make learning to play in an odd-time signature difficult; it doesn’t teach you how to lock in with the nuances of an odd-time signature’s subdivisions.

On the other hand, tons of backing tracks utilize an odd-time signature, or even triple-time. With the help of tracks like this, you can learn to handle the differences between a waltz, a shuffle, and a psychedelic 7/4 riff.

Chord Progressions

Learning to play different rhythms, genres, and time signatures is an important part of learning to play an instrument. But to really take your playing to the next level, you should start playing backing tracks with chord progressions; it’s the best way to combine your rhythmic skills with chord theory and expand your playing ability.

No matter what your favourite genre to play is, you’ll find backing tracks that focus on chord progressions. Browse tracks in jazz, funk, soul, R&B, rock & roll, pop, and plenty more.

Play Solo Over a Chord Progression

Once you’ve got your rhythms and chord progressions down pat, you’re ready for the ultimate in backing track practice: soloing over a chord progression.

It indeed takes a while to reach this level of practice, but once you’re there, the hours will pass like minutes as you have a blast rocking out. What’s more, the next time you’re playing with others, you’ll be able to recognize a chord progression and start soloing over it instantly.

This kind of high-level practicing is popular among even the highest-performing professional musicians, and there’s no reason you can’t benefit from it, too!

Closing Thoughts

If you can get good at playing your instrument with backing tracks, you’ll be good at playing with other musicians. It’s all about jamming, experimenting, and having fun! It’s not about straining your brain to remember music theory; thinking too much about theory while playing can actually hold you back.

In the end, practicing with backing tracks is not only more entertaining than using a metronome, but it’s also a risk-free way to improve as a musician.

If you’re looking to start, or even continue, your musical journey, The Music Studio is here to help! Check out all our programs and classes taught by professional musicians! It’s never too late to start making the magic of music.