Another source for backing tracks that a friend put me on to lately is karaoke tracks.  Particularly nice if you prefer to play by ear and if you use the lyrics as a guide when deciding how to phrase a piece, since they come up on the screen.

Probably a lot of dedicated sites for karaoke tracks, I would imagine.  But I've found plenty the past few days just hunting youtube.  Seems to be a fair amount of Pop, "classic hits", country, and old jazz classics, so far as I have seen.

Some of them are actually pretty good production, with the sounds of a full band or sometimes orchestration, backing vocals at some points, and the other touches that make it fun to play some songs against a track.

I've never been a big fan of karaoke and have never actually done it in the sense of singing to the stuff. But some of it does work pretty well as a very reasonable backing track for playing the vocal melody on violin.

Ran across another source for some backing tracks on youtube.  Not quite karaoke, it's kind of a combination of something like a karaoke but that also shows standard guitar chords.

Pretty neat, and not a bad way to pick up some new tunes for self accompanying if you're one of the folks who sometimes plays guitar and sings.  Pretty good assortment of songs, but not all of them have titles in English.

Not surprising, since it is not an American account.  For music, that doesn't make a huge difference.  Remember that Dur=Major, Moll=minor, what is called a Bb in American/English notation is called a B and what we'd call a B natural is called an H.  Shouldn't present a problem for guitarists anyway, though, since the chord charts are shown. 

Lyrics are in English if the songs lyrics are sung in English, so no language barrier on songs likely to be familiar to most folks here.

Anyway, a fair number of songs on the list.  Some of them may not be familiar, but if you keep looking you'll find some pop and rock and country and even some xmas music. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/S.....nel/videos

Enjoy!

Not saying some here can't or don't do their own. 

All I was saying is that I'm personally not up for explaining how to compose and then record them from scratch.  Sure, I do some of my own.  So do you, Barry, and a few others here. 

While this is an educational site to some degree, I haven't ever seen much educational material here on composing or arranging.  There's not even much on improvising.  Considering we don't even have a forum section for music theory in general, where would you like to start in explaining to someone how to write their own arrangement for accompaniment for a piece?

Like what if someone has just a melody they've learned to play on violin, and they don't play another instrument like guitar or piano, for example?  It *could* be done, with enough multi-tracking.

But hey, if you're up for explaining what chords are when some folks haven't really played any yet, and how to come up with a harmony part when all they have to start from is a melody, and then how to record it in multi-track and then do a mixdown...

Knock yourself out. 

Fiddlerman said
I wish that they had the melody written out instead of the chords. I guess you can't get everything you want in life.

Well, the chords are useful for guitar players.. But having the vocal melody also shown for singers would have been nice, I agree.  I've always thought it kind of odd that things like karaoke tracks don't show a written melody line.  Some singers definitely can read.