Hey, I never let a limited understanding of music theory and limited musical competency stop me from starting my own Gypsy Jazz trio called The Hot Club of Port Charlotte. Ya know, Dunning-Kruger effect and all that... I was the rate limiting step in the band with only minimally competent chord comping on my Gitane Grande Bouche SelMac and occasional vocals while the lead guitar player played sublime stuff. We made it through a couple of practice sessions for an impending coffee house gig before the double bass player suggested we try playing some of the tunes with a Latin beat. D'oh! I was so out of my league. Unfortunately, at the time, the Robin Nolan Trio hadn't yet released their third set of books featuring latin rhythms and Hurricane Charley devastated our county resulting in the other guitar player moving to Colorado and the HCPC withered away in the aftermath.

But my suggestions above were truly offered in earnest. Like CyrilleB suggested, I've had luck playing around with other Jazz styles offered by iReal Pro. Fiddling with the mixer and instrumentation are key in finding your groove within the mix. I believe that some of the limitations of iReal Pro, at least as far as practice is concerned, are typically more within the player than iReal Pro. For instance, when I decided to start playing some music again after a long hiatus, I found myself using iReal Pro again to work up some Fiddle Tunes for Mandolin that Matt Flinner was teaching in one of his courses. Matt typically features a web page with slow videos showing pick direction and includes mP3s at slow, medium, and fast tempos. I noticed that Matt swings like Jethro Burns even on fiddle tunes on the medium and faster tempos. As I became better at learning to swing those notes I was a little frustrated at the lack of swing of the bass and rhythm accompaniment that I would choose from the mixer. I initially thought that there should be a "Swing Slider" to opt for how much you'd like the rhythm to swing before it slowly dawned on me that it was mostly dependent upon me in how I played in relation to the bass line. I've learned that in some case it helps to remove the chordal accompaniment. In other cases, I'll actually try a different musical style to find the kind of bass line AND/OR rhythmic accompaniment to nail the groove that I'm looking for. As mentioned in my original post, with enough practice I find that I don't need iReal Pro at all which, to me anyway, is kind of the real value of iReal Pro.