I'm willing to discuss this at length in the hopes that the Pebber crowd begins to create & share backing tracks. Start a new thread if anyone else is intereted in this. Sorry that this is long, but you did ask for in depth info.
First off, I'm a total beginner at this. My background is an 8-week cousera.org class on music production from Berklee (totally free and you get to keep the lecture videos forever), 'Mixing Secrets' by Mike Senior, and youTube.
I downloaded the 60-day trial of Reaper Reaper as my DAW, and I plan on buying it when that runs out. It's super cheap and does everything the major DAWs do. There's a 300+ page user's manual, a very active forum, and boatloads of videos for anything you'd possible want to do. Rumor has it you don't actually have to pay when the trial runs out, but I don't know that to be true yet.
Drums are most time consuming. There are tons of options, but I chose EZdrummer for now. I create a MIDI track in Reaper and I program the drums using the MIDI editor. Tons of options for that too (play it on a MIDI controller or your computer keyboard, use point & click to draw notes, d'load a guitar pro tab file and export someone else's drums to MIDI, etc., etc.). Add a EZdrummer VSTi to a set of stereo tracks and set up send/receives from the MIDI track to the VSTi tracks. Now the EZdrummer kit is playing my MIDI. For Samba Pa Ti, I did this twice since I used two different EZDrummer kits. One for snares and another for the shakers/congas.
I had two keyboard tracks, again using the MIDI setup described for drums. The 'clean' one uses the VST synth that comes free with Reaper. The Hammond-like one uses a pair two freeware VST plugins: NubiLE (organ) and SpinnerLE (basically a leslie).
There are two bass tracks, but that was just for convenience. For both, I recorded myself playing. I connect through an audio interface and the VST I used was Line 6's Pod Farm. I didn't spent much time at all on fiddling with the sound of the bass. Probably tracked both basslines in under 30 minutes.
Three guitar tracks, again for convenience. One has the first part. One has the high reverb fill. One has the second up-tempo part. I recorded between 1 and 5 takes for various sections of the song. [Cliff, thanks for the feedback. Had I recorded 10, 20, or as many as it takes, I agree I could have nailed everything. Who has time for that?]
This is where I stopped for the first Satriani backing track (having played only 1 take for the guitar; which was totally evident. Thanks again for the feedback Ursin!). For the Santana track, I went to step two:
Once I got everything into Reaper, then the mixing begins. The first step I took was to basically listen a bunch of times to what I had. I'd listen to single tracks, combos of tracks, etc. This told me what really needing fixing, and then that's where I went next. The two most important fixes I think will usually be bad timing on non-MIDI tracks (guitar & bass) and setting appropriate relative volume levels. The first of these is really easy to fix. The send of these is one of the core concepts of 'mixing' which many people make into successful full-time careers. I'm a newbie hack that is just having fun.
After timing fixes and the first shot at balanced volume are set, the next step I took was to start adding effects. In the end, I only ended up using EQs and Compressors. I'm not qualified to explain myself here yet, so I need to defer you to the web (I wrote above what sources I'm using to learn). A real mixer probably wouldn't have stopped there. But, you know, baby steps.
At this point I have a totally unprofessional mix. I could render to wav and then swap it into a webcam video with Windows Movie Maker for the PB forums. Or, I could mute the guitar parts I want to be able to play live and then render a backing track to wav/mp3. Or both!
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