13
Sep
2009
Create Your Own Jam Tracks
When you’re practising the guitar, especially when you’re practising improvising, it’s great to have a set of good backing jam tracks that you can use to play along with.
There are a few ways to get jam tracks - many guitar courses come with a sample, or you can buy them ready made, or you can record your own from scratch.
One thing I realised recently though, is that you can create your own jam tracks, not by recording them from scratch, but by extracting sections from existing tracks.
To do this, you’ll need some audio editing software, either Transcribe or Audacity can be used for this purpose:
With this method, you first start with an audio track (either MP3 or WAV) that you’d like to use. The only real requirement on the track is that there should be a short section of the track, that if you looped over this section continuously, would be good to jam over.
Many songs have an intro or other section where there’s no solo or vocals, that you could use. For example, I used this technique with Lenny Kravitz’ song ‘Are U Gonna Go My Way’. In that song, there’s a short section just before the solo starts, which has exactly the chords used in the solo. By extracting just that section, and repeating it, I was able to create a jam track to play my own version of the solo over.
To create the jam track, load it up into the editing software, the picture above shows a track loaded into Transcribe. Find and select the section which will form the basis of the jam track. Then you need to export just the selected part of the track, but specify that it’s repeated several times (e.g. here I chose it to be repeated 10 times, but this could be 100 times).
The resulting audio file will be your own jam track that you can use when practising.
The tricky part about this technique is that you need to get the timing on the start/end of the looped selection just right, if it’s to flow properly when looped over and over again.
For this reason, I prefer to use Transcribe rather than Audacity, as Transcribe lets you dynamically adjust the start or end of the selected region (using the shift key), as it’s looping round, so you can make sure you get the selection start/end points that sound right. It’s also easy to create as many repetitions as you like of the selected part of the track.
I find this is a good technique for creating a library of my own jam tracks. You can also use this technique to double or triple the length of any existing jam tracks you have.
Give it a try - you can download a free trial of Transcribe and test it out for yourself.
Chris
