Backing Machine
Interactive backing track — click a chord cell to select it, play to animate the score.
The Backing Machine plays a whole band behind a tune — percussion, acoustic guitar and bass — while its score stays on screen. Search online tune collections such as The Session and Folkwiki by title, type or key, or paste ABC notation straight from the clipboard. The backing style then follows the tune's R: field on its own: a reel gets a reel, a jig a jig. Eight families are covered, Irish, Breton, Scottish, English, Cajun, Canadian, American and World, and a chord grid under the score holds two chords per bar for the guitar and bass to follow.
Questions
Does it choose the rhythm by itself?
It reads the tune's R: field when the tune loads and switches the style to match. If the rhythm is missing or unrecognised the style resets to Unknown and you pick one from the Family and Style selectors, which also override the guess at any moment.
Which traditions and tune types are covered?
Irish reels, jigs, slip jigs, slides, hornpipes, polkas, barndances, mazurkas and waltzes; Breton an dro, hanter dro, gavotte, plinn, fisel, laridé and ridée; Scottish reels, jigs, strathspeys, marches and slow airs; English reels, jigs, hornpipes and morris tunes; Cajun two-steps, waltzes, zydeco and juré; Québec reels and gigues with Cape Breton strathspeys; American old-time fiddle shuffle, clawhammer, breakdowns, bluegrass boom-chuck and chop, train beat and blues shuffle; and a World family with klezmer freylekhs and bulgar, Balkan 7/8 and 9/8, son clave, rumba, samba, bossa nova, baião, reggae, afrobeat, Nordic polska and schottis.
Can I change the chords behind the tune?
The chord grid under the score gives two slots per bar. Click a cell, assign or change its chord with the suggestion tool, and the guitar and bass follow on the next pass. Two buttons below the grid write the grid's chords into the ABC score or strip every chord back out of it.
Can I slow a tune down to learn it?
The BPM slider in the score toolbar changes speed while the backing keeps playing, and five shortcuts under it jump to the speeds that style is usually practised at: Very Slow around 40 % of session speed, Slow 55 %, Practice 70 %, Near 85 %, Session 100 %.
What does the backing actually play?
An acoustic guitar and a bass line driven by the chord grid, plus the percussion you select. Each instrument can be switched off or balanced on its own, and the current bar and beat light up in the grid as the tune goes past.