Backing Tracks on a budget

[BGuttman]

I have been asked to do more and more playing for the folks here in the Nursing Home. Listening to an unaccompanied trombone is a little tedious, and I'd like to add some backing tracks. Big problem is, as a resident I have no income so a paid service is out of the question.

Any suggestions on how I can make a backing track on my computer to accompany Fake Book music on a beer budget?

[ithinknot]

Spotify (free with ads) has plenty of karaoke albums that would suit.

iReal Pro is a band-in-a-box app with thousands of standards, and you can program your own additions. It displays the chords, and you control key, tempo and style. It's $15.99 on the Apple and Google stores, but that's a one-off and it's well worth it.

There are free desktop alternatives like JJazzLab - haven't tried it, but it's out there.

[imsevimse]

I found a lot of music-minus-one material on Amazon. Real good stuff both jazz and classical. The first and second fake books can be bought with additional audio. They might cost you around $100 each. I bought mine for $150 but it's because of the higher taxes we have in EU. The intermediate book of classical rep from Canadian Brass was one of the first with classical music I bought. The accompaniment was ready to download from internet on a link and that book was a lot cheaper, maybe $25. It contain one error in the accompaniment in the ragtime at the end where the piano has a short solo. In the repeat the piano has a solo and misses a pause. It becomes a bar in 3/8 instead of a bar in 4/8, but its when the trombone has a rest and it is only for the repeat. If you know it then you listen and adjust to it and it just becomes a bit more syncopated. It sounds okay to my ears . I use MMO-records a lot and can recommend it but of course all are not good, and some contain more errors. There are some with synthetic sounds that are far from good and even contain some severe errors in the audio accompaniments. I would only recommend accompaninents that has been played with real instruments because then it is a mire serious production and you will have less of wrong chords and missed accidentals. I have ONE book from maybe 50 that is so bad it is unplayable. I don't think they are tested much. I personally stay away from the elementary books so I only buy books that says intermediate and advanced. Good luck with your hunting

/Tom

[harrisonreed]

iReal Pro or maybe Garage Band.

[Mr412]

If I read the above posts right and look on the iReal Pro site, I see plenty of source material chord changes, but "only" the chord changes. I don't see the melody lines written out anywhere in musical notation software. That is equally important to me. I suppose if they provided them, the royalties would make the app unaffordable. But maybe I'm missing something...

[dougm]

I have a ton of Band in a Box files I can send you. They are a ".MGU" extension. I have not used Band in a Box in years and have no idea if the program is still available on modern computers.

Doug

[ithinknot]

If I read the above posts right and look on the iReal Pro site, I see plenty of source material chord changes, but "only" the chord changes. I don't see the melody lines written out anywhere in musical notation software. That is equally important to me. I suppose if they provided them, the royalties would make the app unaffordable. But maybe I'm missing something...

Yeah, you need a fake book - the point of the app is accompaniment

[Mr412]

If I read the above posts right and look on the iReal Pro site, I see plenty of source material chord changes, but "only" the chord changes. I don't see the melody lines written out anywhere in musical notation software. That is equally important to me. I suppose if they provided them, the royalties would make the app unaffordable. But maybe I'm missing something...

Yeah, you need a fake book - the point of the app is accompaniment

[sigh] That's what I thought! It's very easy for me to cobble up my own BiaB accompaniment, once I have the melody line & chord changes keyed into a musical notation program. It's the keying in part I am looking to short-cut. I have the Wikifonia database of something like 6,500 files. But I estimate 5,000 or so of them are worthless to me for various reasons.

Okay. Back to obtaining source material for each song I want and then keying them in one-at-a-time. The iReal Pro app is not for me.

Thanks for clarification and validation on what I thought was the case.

[Mr412]

I have a ton of Band in a Box files I can send you. They are a ".MGU" extension. I have not used Band in a Box in years and have no idea if the program is still available on modern computers.

Doug

Thanks Doug, but I believe they would use the old BiaB midi files, etc. I have the latest and greatest, with all the wave files (about 1 terabyte). Long ago, I abandoned using the collection of BiaB files from the Yahoo Forum. There were some embedded elements that caused problems for me. So I deleted the entire database from my hard drive. I prefer to grow my own and it's very easy for me to do so.

[BGuttman]

I have a collection of Fake Books. Somebody gave me a thumb drive with 16 of them many years ago. I've since added a Christmas Fake Book that was posted here either last November or the year before. Some of them are pretty hard to read.

Back at home (if my wife can find it) I have the "1000 Songs" from when I was in High School (the original Fake Book) and the Volume 5 that was published in 1965 ("World's Fairest Songs") in hard copy (but dealing with hardcopy music in my nursing home is tough).

I'm using Linux, so Garageband doesn't go native. They suggested I look at something called LMMS. LMMS looks like a stripped down Ableton Live (I used to have a copy of Live 8, but the computer on which it was installed died; and my wife can't find the disks anyway). I may see if I can make LMMS do what I need to.

One thing I have is plenty of time, but the motivation can sometimes flag.

Incidentally, BiaB is still available for something like $125.

[Briande]

iRealPro with the Real Book. iRealPro has most songs in the real book available on their forum.

[blap73]

Bruce, since you are on Linux... have you looked at MuseScore ? Not really sure if it will work for you, but it is free. I've used it to score snippets of stuff so I can hear what it is supposed to sound like. It does play different instruments (to various degrees, I think the Trombone is terrible). Last used it to produce (readable) score sheets for our trombone section for a warm-up exercise that had every instrument part on 1 sheet and hence was totally unreadable. It appears to be able (via the musescore website) to import a .pdf of music and convert it.

[BGuttman]

Bruce, since you are on Linux... have you looked at MuseScore ? Not really sure if it will work for you, but it is free. I've used it to score snippets of stuff so I can hear what it is supposed to sound like. It does play different instruments (to various degrees, I think the Trombone is terrible). Last used it to produce (readable) score sheets for our trombone section for a warm-up exercise that had every instrument part on 1 sheet and hence was totally unreadable. It appears to be able (via the musescore website) to import a .pdf of music and convert it.

I have MuseScore. I use it as a note processor. Have done so since MuseScore 2.something. Just doesn't create a backing track.