Jam Track: alt-rock

Dust off your delay pedal for an atmospheric and experimental jam session with this month’s alt-rock style backing track

This month’s jam track is inspired by legendary alt-rock bands such as U2, Radiohead and Muse, and has three sections for you to jam along to. The verse and pre-chorus follow the

Bb same four chords (D5, D5/A, and Csus2); the chorus uses three chords (D5, Em7 and Fmaj9) and we have included a fingering for every shape so you can jam along on rhythm guitar. These chords use notes from the key of D minor so the D natural minor scale will sound great throughout the track, providing a pool of notes for simple melodies and blazing solos alike.

We recommend experimenting with textural ideas to give the track some variation during the repeating chord progression. Think about how loud or soft you play, your amp tone, including dirty fuzz and distortion sounds, as well as cleaner, more atmospheric tremolo, phaser and delay effects, which sound great in the verse and chorus. Octave-based melodies are a suitably authentic way of filling out your sound too.