A couple of weeks ago, I have started practising guitar playing again. Before that, I have been on and off playing guitar due to work commitment. But after watching Andy James, a great guitar player from UK, shredding guitar solo, I got inspired and without wasting time, I grab my guitar and look for one of his song’s guitar tablature which is Days Gone By from his greatest album, Exodus.
I know that, it is not a very good idea to start practising using Andy James music because of his great techniques that are quite impossible for me to master in one or two years. But who cares, I just want to play something that I like.
Basically, I use Guitar Pro 5 software to learn all the songs that I want to play on a guitar. I believe you know about this already. Start from the low tempo, I increase it by 5 until I reach 80%. At this point, I have difficulties playing his fast guitar solo (4 notes/176bpm). For this specific tempo, I only manage to get all notes correct at 130-140bpm which I think still a long way to go. I’ll be giving myself another one year to perfect it, hopefully.
Practicing through a metronome is sometime quite boring. So I thinking of jamming along with that song. Usually, I will look for guitar backing tracks from a website called Free Guitar Backing Tracks (www.guitarbackingtrack.com). This website is powered by community which means anyone can upload the backing track that he/she composed in the website. You can only download a backing track if you have at least uploading one backing track. What if you do not have a backing track to download?
There is an alternative to do this by using BackTrackItApp. Just after using the app (android & ios), I am able to remove a guitar solo from a song and in my case the Andy James song, Days Gone By. I can lower the tempo for practising fast guitar solo.
It is quite easy to use the app. Just browse for the song you want to play in your device. The app has the functionalities to change the tempo of the song, advance looping, equaliser, metronome, analysing the chords of the songs and removing the guitar solo. Sounds pretty cool.
The only thing worth mentioning here is that the quality of the music once you turn on the solo removing option is not that good (it is depends on how quality is your mp3 file is). Better than nothing and at least you having more fun rather than guided by the only tick tock tick tock sounds, am I right. And also recording or composing your own backing track requires sometime and also additional equipment and software.
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