While playing in a band is certainly the ultimate goal of many guitarists, getting to the point to where your confident enough in your abilities to go to that first audition takes lots of practice. And though playing along with a metronome is great for technique, it not always very inspiring.
Backing tracks are songs with one or more instruments removed. The omitted instruments are meant to be filled by a live player. It’s like a backing band that will play the same song as many times as it takes for you to learn it, except without any snarky comments. And they’re never late for rehearsal.
Guitarbackingtrack.com is a site with thousands of these tracks, all for free. Not surprisingly the genres represented best are rock, pop and blues. The quality of each track varies widely as all tracks are user submitted. Some are the actual track, processed through software to remove the guitar parts, others are done as cover songs, or played completely with midi instruments.
It’s a great resource and may be just the thing to get you out of a rut, or make guitar playing more fun so you’ll end up playing more.
What are the factors that make one guitar easier to play than another? I play guitar and I’ve noticed that some guitars are just easier to play. The pick seems to glide through the strings more fluidly and it seems to make a nice sound without much effort on some guitars, but on others it is hard to strum and it just sounds bad. My guitar is like this. I have a Gibson Epiphone and it sounds bad and I have trouble strumming on it. When I play someone else’s guitar or another guitar at a music store, I can play effortlessy. There are other guitars that sound bad and are hard to play, but it always seems like the one that I have is hard to play. Does it have to do with the strings? Does it have to do with how the strings are mounted? I was recently playing my roommate’s Schecter guitar, and the strings felt so firm, yet it was easy to play and it sounded good. I took the strings off of mine and put them on his. So the same strings that were on my bad sounding guitar, sounded good on his.
His guitar was also easier to play. The same exact strings that were on mine were used, yet his guitar was easier for me to play. I must be cursed.
A lot of factors effect a guitars playability. But generally a guitar feels hard to play if the action is too high. The first thing to check is you guiter necks relief. This is the amount your neck bows forward. The way you measure this is to put a capo on the first fret, then fret the low E string at the point where the neck meets the body, usually around the 12-14th fret. Then measure the distance from the bottom of the E string to the top of the the 7th fret. This measurement should be between .005 -.020″, depending on if you have a light fast touch, or like to wail away at your strings.
Usually a trussrod adjustment will be all you’ll need to correct this. There’s lot’s of info on this on the web, it’s not hard, but be sure to only make small adjustments as you can ruin your neck.
If there are still problems, you may need the nut and/or saddles adjusted. If the strings start to buzz when you lower the string action, then your frets will probably need to be dressed. If your not comfortable with any of this I suggest taking your guitar to a good luthier and ask that your guitar be “setup”. This can cost between $50-$150 depending on the shop and what is needed to correct your guitar. But it’s definitely money well spent as it can transform an unplayable guitar into one you’ll love. Good luck!
I am planning on becoming really good at playing the guitar but i love playing guitar hero too…would that be weird if i was really good at the guitar and played guitar hero still?