Thursday, July 03, 2008

BluesJamTracks.com

Posted by Jon in • Guitar Sites

BluesJamTracks
After a recent discussion over at GuitarFlame.com about recording our playing I decided to turn to YouTube for some inspiration. Well it didn’t take long until I was gazing in awe at the mastery of Guthrie Govan playing over some backing tracks. As I was watching I had the sudden urge to play over the same backing track and so I visited a site I haven’t been to in a while BluesJamTracks.com.  I’ve wondered for a while whether I would ever find this site useful because in my head I think why pay for a backing track when I can create one myself. But in reality thats never going to happen, I simply don’t have the time or the energy so I promptly proceeded to download the Larry Carlton backing track from the Rock Blues section.

There are various styles from old chicago blues to 60’s blues to contemporary blues, they have bundle offers where you can download a load for a discounted price (£7.99) or individually for £0.99 which I think is a fair price, it costs less than a pint of your favourite lager (and considering I haven’t lived in England for 6 years I imagine it is a LOT less than a pint!). The purchasing process is all handled by PayPal so it is nice and secure if you already have a PayPal account takes less than a minute to start downloading your track. The track I chose came with another mp3 that has an example solo being played over it and a pdf of the tab for the solo which is a cool extra to have!

If you want to hear some examples of the quality of the backing tracks (they are very professional) check out the Contemporary Blues Bundle page where Guthrie Govan shows us how its done! Also check out The Blue Room where famous guitarists such as Steve Vai and Paul Gilbert have recorded their take on some of the backing tracks.

So its time to put my money where my mouth is. I thought I should record a solo over the Larry Carlton backing track with my best Greg Howe vibrato/glissando impression!

In case anyone has trouble with the mp3 player above I have also uploaded it to my Ultimate Guitar profile.

Recently on Guitar Noize

Ovidiu - GuitarFlame.com on 07/03 at 04:35 PM

Nice one, Jon, really nice one! You’ve got some licks there! And the site you pointed us to, I must admit I didn’t know about it, it’s one of the coolest discoveries ever! All those tracks there are wonderful!I bookmarked it for going there again to take a few tracks!

I must record something myself now, I guess, to put my money where my mouth is, I guess, right? grin

Jon on 07/03 at 05:14 PM

Thanks Ovidiu, the tracks are really great I’m going to purchase a few more. The one I bought I thought would be the most challenging as it is a bit jazzy without being crazy hard to improvise over. Next one I buy will probably be more of a SRV style as I’m trying to put a blues band together at the moment!

Josh on 07/04 at 12:16 AM

Hey Jon, I had forgotten all about BluesJamTracks.com. Thanks for reminding me! Great licks, btw. I enjoyed listening to your track.

Jon on 07/04 at 07:49 AM

Thanks Josh, I’ll be recording a whole load more soon so I’ll keep posting them up on Guitar Noize!

Tim on 07/06 at 11:27 PM

Very nice solo. I have this same backing track on my GNX4. I believe I got it at the Les Paul Forums. Check out the forums because there are a lot of FREE backing tracks there.

Jon on 07/07 at 03:45 PM

Hi Tim, I’ve used http://guitarbackingtracks.com/ for free backing tracks before but I thought it would be good to test commercial quality backing tracks, and they’re only 99p each!

Jonathan on 07/22 at 03:42 PM

That’s good stuff! I have your post bookmarked and sent it to a few friends too…

Jon on 07/22 at 04:09 PM

Hi Jonathan, glad it was useful to you smile

Stevie Ray Vaughan on 08/07 at 10:20 AM

I know what you mean. I can just make backing tracks myself but god I do not feel like taking the time to do so. I’d rather spend that time recording MY music. although I do feel like I want to make some backing tracks pretty soon because there’s so many songs I love but there’s no backing track for.
Hell - might as well go ahead and do a cover and then give a version away without guitar.

I think I’ll check out bluesjamtracks. Thanks
smile

Jon on 08/07 at 12:28 PM

Stevie’s back! Yeah you know sometimes you just want to jam and not spend time setting up, that’s when these tracks are great. If you have something like a vox amplug and an ipod you can jam all day with little setup!

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