Soulbacks

[ubizmo]

I've bought a few backing tracks from JazzBacks, and found them to be good quality.  They recently spawned a sister site, SoulBacks.  As the name suggests, this site has more soul and R&B music.  At present, they don't have that many tracks for melody instruments, but I'm sure they'll be adding more.  The nice thing about these is that they are live instruments, not midis.  I just bought "Dock of the Bay" and I'll be doing a video of that sometime soon (although life is a lot busier lately).

They send the sheet music and guitar chords along with the tracks.

Most of the tracks are available in two keys, which can be handy.  Unlike midis, you can't just transpose to any key.  You can use an audio editor to change pitch a bit, yet, but any large transposition (more than a semitone, in my opinion) ruins the sound.

Ubizmo

[Yaara]

Silly question:  What do you think of playing along with karaoke cds?  I have a cheap karaoke machine, because I'm a huge nerd, and about 900 songs on cd.  Some of the Christmas carols are in the right key for my limited talents on alto recorder.  I'm not sure what the mechanics of recording myself would be, but it's been fun to fool around.  The sound quality probably isn't as good as that of your backing tracks, though.

[ubizmo]

I don't have a karaoke machine but I have the idea that they use midi tracks, synced up to lyrics. Midis never sound as good as real instruments but some are pretty good anyway. Some are awful. I've pulled a few videos down just because the midis were so bad. So it's just a question of how good the track is. It should work okay.

Ubizmo