Monday, September 29, 2008

Steve Vai Naked tracks on sale!

Posted by Jon in •

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Back in July I posted about the imminent release of Steve Vai’s Naked Tracks a set of 5 volumes worth of backing tracks with the lead parts removed for you to play along to. I was pretty excited about the prospect so as soon as I noticed that they had gone on sale I decided to download a track to test.

I decided on the track ‘Answers’ from one of my all time favourite guitar albums ‘Passion & Warfare’ because, well, compared to the rest of the album its not too technically challenging! I downloaded the track from iTunes which cost me AUD$1.69 and loaded it up in Abelton Live 7. Now I’m not sure why or how this happened but the first 8 bars played at a different tempo to the rest of the song, it doesn’t happen when I listen to the track in iTunes just when I import into Abelton. Weird, ah well I couldn’t be bothered to work it out so the first 8 bars play at 107bpm and then I switch to 95bpm even though it continues to play at the same tempo (this also happens momentarily at 4:15 too). I’m sure this is some kind of weirdness that I don’t have the technical knowledge to fix rather than a problem with the track.

So the first thing I noticed was that this is an extended version of the track… damn I thought I was going to get away with the album version! The idea is that there are extended solo sections which presumably Mr Vai uses in live performances but I suddenly realised that I was going to have to record a solo… over a Vai track… gulp! Well I figured out that E Mixolydian seemed to do the trick so I didn’t stray much from that and probably made the mistake of trying to sound like Vai instead of me but its very tempting when you have the whole Vai backing section behind your playing!

Below is the finished version, I didn’t do it one take and its a bit sloppy in places but it is to show the quality of the Naked tracks, not my playing! I will be downloading a few more of my fave Vai tracks to play along to because you don’t have to download the whole album and I’m hardly going to even notice $1.69 disappearing out of my bank account.

In case anyone is having trouble playing the above example I have also uploaded the track to my Ultimate-Guitar.com profile.

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flash games com on 10/03 at 10:09 PM

Good decision! No good can come from burying yourselves into archiac technology. Not many developers have the courage or the patience to willingly go back and recode large portions of their existing work. Best of luck!

Jon on 10/03 at 10:47 PM

Erm…yeah…right…

on 10/31 at 05:16 AM

You don’t give yourself enough credit.  I thought you did a pretty good job.  Blends in quite well.  I don’t think I would have known Vai wasn’t playing lead unless I really knew the song.  For myself I will stick with the much slower tracks so my playing won’t destroy the music as much(Touching Tongues, Liberty, etc.).  But thanks for the review of the naked tracks.  I was wondering if I should get any for fun.

on 10/31 at 06:50 AM

Thanks for the compliment Rich, I hope you have as much fun playing along to the tracks as I do!

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