What's A Backing Track?

Bernard Chinn's Music Site
Custom MIDI Backing Tracks and Transcriptions

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What's A Backing Track?

Our backing tracks are MIDI sequences that you can play along with when you are learning to play or sing a tune's melody and when you are learning to solo over its changes. They provide the complete accompaniment that you would expect to hear if you were playing with a band, (a chordal instrument playing the chords of a tune using interesting comping patterns together with a bass and drum accompaniment to keep time.)

The preview you've just listened to is a shortened version of the complete track (usually the first A section of the tune, plus a bit of the bridge) intended to allow you to hear how the complete track feels. The complete track that we supply when you purchase it, plays through the entire form of a tune enough times (2 to 4 repetitions) so that you can get lengthy experience soloing on the tune's changes. We always include scores for the changes in concert key, and transposed scores for Bb and Eb instruments.

Why do we charge for backing tracks, when we provide complete chord-only sequences for free in "The Changes" section of SongTrellis? The tracks listed in "The Changes" were all generated by software that is part of the unreleased SongTrellis Music Editor. It takes only a few minutes and little skill to prepare one of those tracks.

It takes much more knowledge and skill, tastefully applied, for Bernard Chinn to create his backing tracks. You get the benefit of Bernard's 60 years performing as a piano accompanist, his sense of good taste and appropriateness as an arranger plus his skill in preparing properly balanced MIDI tracks. This constellation of skills is not typically found within one head. $2.00 per single tune purchased seems like a fair and entirely reasonable price for access to the fruits of his labor. If you buy his entire collection, the price per tune drops to 46 cents.

Why do we offer MIDI files rather than mp3 files? The quality of sound of Bernard's MIDI sequences approaches that of an MP3 sequence. For the practicing musician, MIDI sequences have some benefits that MP3s can't provide. First, MIDI sequences can be tloaded in a sequencing program and time scaled perfectly so that they can be played faster or slower to match the practicing musicians skill level without the added distorting noise which almost always is produced when you attempt time scaling on an MP3 track. You can also accurately transpose the MIDI track to a new key without damaging the quality of the track.

MIDI files are also typicallly nearly 100 times smaller than an MP3 file that lasts the same duration. They are very fast to download. We can easily afford to provide you with a unique page that plays the sequence you've purchased when you visit the BernardChinn subsite of SongTrellis.

Last update: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 at 11:37 PM.