By Carolyn Heneghan
Perfect performances mean plenty of practice. Whether you’re a musician, dancer or choreographer, you’ll often need to practice with some sort of background track or playlist, whether that’s your own music, music you’re performing to or with or just something you can jam and freestyle to.
In the past, this would usually involve playing a song or songs on a tape, CD or iTunes in the background. You might have to constantly get up to start, stop or change the music. You might have to deal with pauses between songs that won’t normally be there when you’re actually performing live. Or, you might have to find a live backing band (or gather your own) just to be able to have a jam session for writing new pieces.
But now, in the age of apps, all that is simplified. Two apps of this kind are OneTrack and the Backing Track App.
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The main feature of OneTrack is the In and Out points which make it easy and convenient for you to schedule how and when you want a song, songs or part(s) of a song to play in the background. If you don’t want your music to skip to the next track, that is in your control. If you want the tracks to flow seamlessly from one to the next, that is in your control too. You can even control the music to give you a set number of seconds (under 60) for you to talk to your audience and have your background music come back in softly and on cue.
You can control the volume for each track, and you can even set a count-in of a few seconds if you like. If you want to rehearse a certain part of a song, you can adjust the In and Out points around that part and set the track to Loop and Autoplay for it to play indefinitely along with you until you choose to stop it.
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The Backing Track App works a little differently. Instead of uploading a playlist like on OneTrack, the Backing Track App has 10 themes to choose from, which are available in four tempos and 12 keys for a total of almost 500 possible tracks. All you have to do is select the track, tap the tempo and key icons and press play.
This app is especially useful for novice musicians looking for an easy way to jam without an entire backing band. If you’re new to songwriting or soloing, this can be a great way to start to learn what notes work with different keys and styles of music—all in your own practice space, on your own time. While not as feature-rich as OneTrack, this app is a cheaper and slimmed-down version for those who need just a little boost of background music to get them started.
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OneTrack is available for download from the iTunes App Store for $4.99.
The Backing Track App is available for download from the iTunes App Store for $.99.
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