Well, this has been an interesting week. I started a C# programming course online, and I finally received Planet of Rock’s ‘Hard Rock Guitar Style’ backing tracks double CD package. I ordered it 12 days ago - I thought PoR was based in California, so shipping shouldn’t have been a long process. Well, turns out, the CDs came from Thailand. (I actually initiated a PayPal claim, since I thought something happened and I needed to protect my $15.)

Now that they’re here, though, I’m going to give them a pretty good review. 18 tracks and there’s quite a lot to like. With, at my count, four of the 18 tracks being slower ballad-y numbers, plenty more are hard charging ditties, and a good number are just straight forward rock-ish. Pay no attention to the dumb track names (a ballad named “Lucifer’s Love“? that’s just icky.) One of them is sweet old-school “And Justice for All”-era Metallica, named fittingly, “Masters of Metal.“  There are some sample clips on the product page so you can hear that you’re getting real honest-to-goodness studio recorded rock music.

CD one has ‘Hard Rock‘ and ‘Heavy Metal‘ styles of backing tracks; the second CD has ‘Rock Ballads‘ and ‘Soft Rock‘ styles of tracks (note: ballads is misspelled on the cds, as ‘ballards’ indicating that there’s perhaps a bit more Thailand in the production of these otherwise decent CDs than you’d think otherwise.)

High-quality rythym guitar, drums, and bass music make up the 33 backing tracks on two CDs. No vocals, no lead guitar. They’re instrumental music tracks. Backing tracks are made primarily for you to practice your lead / solo / improvisational skills against. Backing tracks also make you adjust to the music - tempo changes, key changes. Your musical imagination really gets to working, as you work to come up with different arrangements every time you play a track.

One of the more evocative tracks is titled Think Pink in Gm. It’s on the second CD in the Soft Rock category.It really hearkens back to the “Wish You Were Here” days of Pink Floyd, and when listening to the track on its own you can just hear David Gilmour playing soulfully - it invites you to do so yourself!

I wish that this Hard Rock guitar style backing tracks package came with the following information: beats-per-minute and the musical key that each track is recorded in. If you’re really a noob, you’ll want to stick with the tracks that are slower than others, and it’d be handy if that was labelled somewhere. And while the key of a few of the tracks are printed on the CDs themselves, it would’ve helped if the tracks came with documentation indicating what key they were recorded in, you could go right to a particular scale or set of scales instead of trying to figure out what key your playing would work best with a particular track. Some might also think the tracks are a little vanilla. Well, that may be, but the idea is to have a library of tracks to choose from. I am sure that at least some of these tracks will get your motor running.

The CDs aren’t shipped in a fancy jewel case and don’t have any documentation, just simply labelled discs sent in a padded mailer.

I love backing tracks for practice and just plain fun guitar playing. You can check out a better written article on the topic here.

Happy Weekend to all!

-the Noob.