Add a backing track to a lesson book
A student who can hear the accompaniment practices differently: the tempo holds, the entries land, the piece feels like music instead of a page of notes. This guide is for teachers who want each piece in a lesson book to play its backing track the moment the student turns to it.
What you need
- The lesson book as a PDF. A scan is fine. Nothing on the pages is changed.
- One recording per piece. Record the accompaniment on your phone (the voice memo app saves m4a, which is ideal), or export from whatever you use to make backing tracks. Name the files by piece so you can tell them apart later.
- Ten minutes.
Recording tips that matter more than gear
- Record the piece at the tempo you want the student to practice at. A second, slower take is worth more than a better microphone.
- Leave one bar of count-in at the start. Students need it to enter; you can point the file at the first downbeat later if you prefer.
- Keep each take under three minutes if you can. Audio adds roughly one megabyte per minute to the file.
Making the file
- Open the maker and drop the lesson-book PDF.
- Under Tracks, use Add an audio file and choose all your recordings at once. Each becomes a track; click the titles to name them after the pieces.
- Under Pages, pick the track for the page where each piece begins. Pages you leave empty keep playing the previous piece, so a four-page sonatina needs only one assignment on its first page.
- If a recording has a long count-in, type the time of the first downbeat into Start (for example
0:04). - Give the file a title and choose Save as PDF.
Two tempos for one piece
Add both takes as tracks (say “Canon · slow” and “Canon · tempo”) and assign the slow one to the page. The student can switch to the tempo take from the track list in the player at any time, and the page assignment stays as the default.
Sending it
Files with embedded audio are sent as files, not links: this site never stores audio, so the link button refuses them. Send the PDF by chat or mail as it is. It opens in any PDF app as a normal book; in the viewer or any MPDF-aware app the accompaniment plays. Everything works offline once the file is on the student's device.
Updating later
Drop the finished file back into the maker. It recognizes the existing tracks and page assignments, so you can replace one recording or add a new piece and save again.