Ho-Ho-Ho – Time to Practice!

It’s a great time of the year for music. Lot’s of tunes to pick from and just about everyone will know whatever songs you pick to play. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little rusty on some of the tunes that we play around this time of the year. You know what that means – It’s time to start practicing!

With all the technology available these days, practice time is a little more fun vs. when I started playing many years ago. To get started for this season I loaded in a few MIDI and MP3 files to play along with. That’s a topic we haven’t touched on yet, but maybe we should put that on the top of the list for our next video. There are a number of things we probably should point out just to make sure you understand the various options when loading those file types.

While we were loading up our files we also scanned the sheet music for those tunes into the Sonic. You did watch the video on the steps to do that right? 🙂  As a final step, we setup two user banks (Holiday_1 and Holiday_2) and a user preset that will load the correct MIDI or MP3 file and the supporting sheet music for each tune. (See our presets below).

Some folks like playing with “backing tracks”, some don’t. We do. We uploaded two examples. One is a MIDI file while the other is a MP3 file. Can you tell which is which? We played the melody line while the “tracks” did all the hard work. Like we said – Practice is a lot more fun these days!