I am desperately looking for instrumental popular songs (accompaniment) to sing over. Preferably not orchestral but with solo instruments, like piano or guitar. I would use them in Studio One and Kontakt.

High quality instrumentals are interesting and welcome too, but not as good if one needs to transpose!

 

I think "General MIDI files" are the closest thing to what you are looking for, since you do not want to deal with audio. I have no idea which of the GM song websites are good for different genres, etc. There have always been so many sites when you Google for them. A good % are total BS, probably worse than fake warez sites.


General MIDI (GM)
By Sweetwater on Aug 7, 2001, 12:00 AM
A set of requirements for MIDI devices aimed at ensuring consistent playback performance on all instruments bearing the GM logo. Some of the requirements include 24-voice polyphony, a standardized group (and location) of sounds, as well as defining a limited number of controllers. For example, patch #17 will always be a drawbar organ sound on all General MIDI instruments. Continuous controller number 7 will control its volume. Music written and sequenced for General MIDI should play back with the same instrument sounds on any General MIDI (GM) sound source.

 

XG were a better format and also General Midi 1.
IF you google you can find a few sites.

There is a XG site Yamaha had a XG player.
Also Halon SE will do general Midi and general mid 1 format.

 

I'm not sure why you'd want midi files instead of karaoke files

 

Maybe this helps https://www.musicindustryhowto.com/professional-midi-files/?

 

I think I didn't correctly express myself and created a misunderstanding. What I am looking for is Solo (Piano or Guitar) version of a song and not a GM multi-track. Karaoke files are fun in a Karaoke bar but it's not often that you get a good quality ones and I almost never seen one sound professional. My idea was to get a good piano midi file and use it with the best possible Virtual Piano instrument in Studio One and be able to transpose if needed without quality loss.

But in general I would appreciate any kind of backing tracks I could get as long as it approaches a near pro quality. To be honest I personally most of the time enjoy a intimate acoustic version of a song more then the studio full band one.

 

Very nice but expensive

 

Two are free, BitMIDI & MIDIWorld.

 

What I do, and this is a bit hit-and-miss and quite tedious, so probably not what you want, is this:

I go to https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/, search for a song, filter for 'Guitar Pro' and open all the versions they have.
The 'Instruments' comment on the page usually tells you which instruments were tracked.

I then convert the Guitar Pro file to MIDI using https://github.com/rageagainsthepc/GuitarPro-to-Midi/

You'll end up with a single MIDI file containing separate tracks for each instrument.
I then just put instruments on each track and try to recreate the sound.

 

I don't know how I did miss them! Thanks a lot for sharing

Thanks a lot for the tip. I have learned so much from people in this forum and really appreciate your help.