I have two modes when I play, one is composing and the other is making covers. The latter one is how I practice. I don’t have time or energy to do mindless scale runs etc. Making covers pushes me to practice actual techniques to get it as close to the original as possible. When you aim for that instead of focusing on an artistic interpretation it’s also nice to have a backing track that’s as close to the original as possible.
Sometimes you can find nice backing tracks to download, but it’s not very common if you want to cover a bit lesser known tracks. What almost always exists though, are guitar pro files for almost any song. And with a guitar pro file your set. Here’s a video I made of how to transform a guitar pro file into a great-sounding backing track:
