How to Create a Guitar Backing Track on Mac

How to Create a Guitar Backing Track
on Mac

A helpful guide to producing backing tracks on your own without any expenses.

So what is a guitar backing track? In short, it’s a recording that is created to help guitarists learn and practice well-known songs.
There are three main ways to create backing tracks:

  1. Record live instruments – This is the most complicated and requires a lot of recording equipment and skill to play and record all of the instruments. If you know how to do this, you don’t need this article.
  2. MIDI Backing Tracks – This is the simplest method. Just get a MIDI file from a website or convert a Guitar Pro file into MIDI, remove the guitar’s MIDI part and you’re done, however the sound quality sucks.
  3. Audio-enhanced MIDI Backing Tracks – Use DAWs and VST plugins to replace MIDI sounds with higher-quality digital instruments.

The third method is a good compromise between simplicity and quality. So we’ll focus on that.
There are no strict rules on what musical instruments should be used in a backing track, however Bass and Drums are the minimum requirements since they provide the foundation of the song.
In this guide we take a simple Blues composition and show how you can enhance the MIDI sound in GarageBand and remove the guitar.

We start with exporting MIDI from Guitar Pro file, but if you don’t have Guitar Pro you can use web archives of MIDI files like this one: https://freemidi.org/

In this video we mention Addictive Keys from XLN Audio.
If you’re interested in paid libraries of sound effects which allow to get more professional sound you can check out these links:
https://www.xlnaudio.com/addictivekeys
https://www.xlnaudio.com/addictivedrums