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I agree with this...but I'd also add--you might need to be a pretty good musician to really get something out of practicing with tracks.
Originally Posted by kris
I have a different opinion on backing tracks.
If they are very well recorded and correctly, it's a pleasure to practice with them.
It's not true that good musicians don't practice with backing tracks.You need to know what to practice and how to make noticeable progress in the playing ...
I say this because I can tell you for a FACT that if I practice too much with tracks, I can hear all sorts of problems coming up in my playing when I listen back
Or maybe that IS me getting something out of playing with tracks (head explodes)
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05-04-2022 11:47 AM
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There is only one recipe: practise a lot and play with those who are better than you. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
I agree with this...but I'd also add--you might need to be a pretty good musician to really get something out of practicing with tracks.
I say this because I can tell you for a FACT that if I practice too much with tracks, I can hear all sorts of problems coming up in my playing when I listen back
Or maybe that IS me getting something out of playing with tracks (head explodes)
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I don’t care who BB hired. Listen to what the players say. Originally Posted by voxo
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Because for the simple reason that it is often hard to get students to play or practice without backing. So it becomes a crutch. Originally Posted by princeplanet
Interesting take. FWIW I actually do practice things I know without backing tracks, because I can hear the harmony in my head and I can sort of tell how extensions and alterations sound against the the "imagined" harmony in said head. But here's the thing, how I got to that point was by drilling as many ideas as I could think of against thousands of choruses of backing tracked tunes. Without doing that first for a long time there was no way of really hearing more obscure but cool voice leading in my lines. I needed to hear the tension / release thing against some sound, not just trying to hear it in my head when I couldn't really.
So if anything, for myself at least, I'd say it makes more sense to practice with backing tracks, and play tunes I can hear in my head without them. But probably not before...
Hmm, there are too many ways to skin the cat i suppose, and I'd never insist what works for me should work for others. Hence I find it a little offensive when even experienced educators like to insist that there's a one size fits all solution to learning Jazz. You've read "Thinking In Jazz", all the greats found different paths up the Jazz mountain, and while they had no choice in their day but to have to play with recordings and people, my firm bet is that many of them would have loved the opportunity to use many of the various learning aids we have today if they were available back then.
If a teacher today thinks their student's progress is stunted due to practicing with backing tracks, how can they be sure it's not due to any one of thousands of other possible reasons! (including inappropriate or ineffective teaching methods)...
i don’t care too much what people do if they aren’t reliant on it.
if you are jamming with a backing track and killing it I don’t care. If not it covers up a multitude of problems that are best addressed away from backing tracks in lessons and practice.
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"Clean up in aisle five...." Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
I agree with this...but I'd also add--you might need to be a pretty good musician to really get something out of practicing with tracks.
I say this because I can tell you for a FACT that if I practice too much with tracks, I can hear all sorts of problems coming up in my playing when I listen back
Or maybe that IS me getting something out of playing with tracks (head explodes)
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I'm at that fun point in my playing where beginners think I'm too good to be playing with them and good players know much, much better than to want to play with me Originally Posted by kris
There is only one recipe: practise a lot and play with those who are better than you.
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BB is a great sofware. I am player. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Recalling my days teaching from the back of a music store, it was often hard to get students to just practice! If BIAB was around back then, more of them might have actually learned to be good players. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
If you wanna be the next Pat Metheny, then yeah, make it hard for yourself and don't use any crutches. But backing tracks will be useful to the greater majority of players, all styles, all levels. And yes, they may cause some unwanted habits (all addressable down the track). But they'll also get into the very desirable habit of practicing! Which easily forgives all sins.
Honestly, I can't fathom why there seems to be such a pushback by some guys. Jealousy perhaps (that they never had it so easy?)...
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I can tell you for a fact that whenever I listen to any recordings of my playing, I hear all sorts of problems. Since I got a little digital recorder and have been recording every show we do for the last few months, I've alternated between being highly motivated to improve and being severely depressed over not having improved. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
I can tell you for a FACT that if I practice too much with tracks, I can hear all sorts of problems coming up in my playing when I listen back
Even our Virtual Jam subforum has been eye opening. I've followed the guidelines to lay down unrehearsed takes of the tunes of the week, and the results have been educational to say the least. But moving away from what I'm accustomed to playing has been beneficial in many ways (once I learned to live with the smell of bad clams). Yesterday, I took a pass at playing the jam song of the week (Gerry Mulligan's "Cat Walk") gypsy style. I've always loved listening to guys like Joscho Stephan and Birelli Lagrene (yes, and Django), but I'd never actually tried to do it myself. Oy vey!! But there are a few licks hidden in my poorly disguised and quite ordinary jazz runs that are truly in the gypsy style. So I'm motivated and will hopefully improve with time.........lots and lots of time!
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Bloody hell I’m not THAT old Originally Posted by princeplanet
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I'm definitely not anti-track. What I'm saying is, if I spend a lot of time playing with them, I do notice that I can start "coasting" a bit more than I want to...playing around key centers too much and not highlighting enough tension/resolution. Getting "noodley."
Of course, the opposite is playing without any kind of backing and over-chasing changes because you're trying to force the harmony to be heard clearly. I do that do.
Damn, I need a few extra lifetimes for this jazz shit.
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I'm sort of trolling here, but Charles Mingus re-recorded his bass for the Massey Hall recordings with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. That's a hell of a backing track.
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I just gotta say that I felt my playing only really started to improve after you started the Virtual Jam threads (thanks for that...always appreciative of your efforts there) in which we all almost exclusively play over backing tracks. Could be like standardized test prep, though: you practice taking tests, you get better at taking tests. I know from experience that what I am able to pull off doing repeated takes against a backing track doesn't always translate into improvising deftly over single on-the-spot chorus in an environment with other live musicians. But I also know that a backing track kind of forces you to learn and practice an entire tune, rather than just playing the first 4 bars over and over again and never really getting anywhere. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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I think everything has its place. Practice alone with just a metronome, so you get a feel for supporting changes and perfect time. Play with drum genius, so it resembles a drummer. Play with backing tracks so it's like a band introduction, minus the interaction, record with a looper, practice with CDs so you jam with the masters feel and language, play with other people. To mix everything is the best solution.
The weirdest i've heard is something David Liebman used to do: to work on concentration, he used to practice with irrelevant music on, he would have a CD playing and practice something else over it!!
I guess his book on chromaticism makes sense now!! Haha i think i have played a gig under these conditions, a brazilian music date in a multi-room club, i remember a frustrated singer asking us to do the second set instrumental..!
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Me too, however I recently switched to JJazzLab. Simpler but very capable for backing tracks, and somehow I like the Yamaha styles better than BIAB styles. Happily JJazzLab reads/imports all the stuff I created in BIAB Originally Posted by kris
Band in The Box is the best software for learning jazz.
This is also some kind of metronome but it's more fun to practice .
I have known this software / BB / since its birth.
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Apparently Glenn Gould used to practise Bach on the piano with a vacuum-cleaner running in the room, he said it helped him concentrate (!).
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Unfortunately, the result was him humming like a vacuum cleaner on his recordings. Originally Posted by grahambop
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That sucks. Originally Posted by John A.
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Or he was just very nice for the wife who cleaned. Originally Posted by grahambop
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My Improvisation on Angel Eyes: Originally Posted by emanresu
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Originally Posted by Alter
The weirdest i've heard is something David Liebman used to do: to work on concentration, he used to practice with irrelevant music on, he would have a CD playing and practice something else over it!! I guess his book on chromaticism makes sense now!! Haha i think i have played a gig under these conditions, a brazilian music date in a multi-room club, i remember a frustrated singer asking us to do the second set instrumental..!
Practicing and playing with distractions...now there's a topic I'm actually an expert on
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mouahahahahah Originally Posted by John A.
is it the same model that Elvin Jones or Oscar Peterson were using ?
And Keith Jarret seemed to have a good one too.
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Well, thanks for that. I'm truly glad it was useful. Originally Posted by wzpgsr
It's funny how many people questioned the intentions of that project...it was just a way to hear a bunch of people play the same song, and it was spawned from pandemic burnout...not being able to go see live music or play with other people. I literally got private messages from people--who never participated-- saying "how can you call that a jam? There's no interaction" and worse. I mean...of course there was no interaction...maybe I should have called it the virtual not a jam.
It was, however, during the initial run of that project that I found myself using tracks more than usual, and there were some things I started to hear in my playing I didn't love. BUT, I also learned a bunch of new tunes, got better at my "internalize a tune quickly" method, and forced myself to put some rough early takes out there as a learning experience, so overall, I felt the good FAR outweighed the bad.
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As a newcomer to the forum, it's been my favourite set of threads.
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If not for the jam threads I probably wouldn't have stumbled onto Mr. Sunnybass, so that makes it worth the price of admission for me. Beyond that, picking up a bunch of new tunes was great, and for me too it reinforced methods of doing so relatively quickly. I agree that playing over backing tracks can get kind of stiff, especially in the way they lull one into straight 1/8's auto-pilot and laziness about time. But once you recognize it you can work against it. Nothing beats playing with real people in the real world, though. If one doesn't have access to other players, one makes do with tracks. I get that. But if one has access to that and stays away from it in favor of playing with backing tracks, that's a mistake. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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