Hi Russ,

Not a dumb question at all of course! However some might consider playing along with a midi file is not really making music, it can be fun and good practise for new tunes.

This is how it works. You load a midifile in your keyboard. This file is in fact a virtual 16 track "tape" recording. The difference is that it is not the sound that is recorded but all the information of key strokes as well as settings, effects etc.

You can edit the instrument settings of all tracks once it's loaded. Than you can decide which track(s) you want to mute. This track, e.g. piano lead, you can then play yourself. It's best that you printout the sheet music for this particular track with one of the available music editing/recording programs like Cubase.

When you play along you have your midifile as a virtual band instead of the accompaniment of the keyboard. As I said, this can be great fun, assuming that you use good quality midifiles.

The latest keyboards can show the score on the display and recognize the chords from the midifile so you I think this will make it easy to learn to play these songs with "normal" accompaniment.

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Tom NL