Over the years I have seen this done. For the most part it sounded less than great. One exception that comes to mind was Andy Timmons who is a well known guitar player from Plano Texas. He used his album and muted some of the guitar tracks so he could play those parts live. He was doing this to demo Mesa Boogie's Lone Star amps. It sounded really good.
 
My question really is how to go about getting really good backing tracks without spending a zillion dollars paying studio musicians to play the separate tracks.
 
If someone was able to play drums, bass, guitar, keys, horns, and sing really well, that person could do the backing tracks by themselves. Well....that for sure is not me and I assume not many people could do that.
 
So why play to backing tracks to begin? 
1. You want to play live by your self or perhaps with one other person
2. You actually want to get paid to do this.
 
There is a market in many areas of the country willing to pay relatively small amounts of money for a live musician. In the range of $50.00 per hour. IF THE MUSIC SOUNDS PROFESIONAL
 
What they are not willing to do is pay four or five musicians $50.00 per hour to play.
 
And yes, I know bands that get paid next to nothing and others that get paid ok and a few that get paid very well.
 
I guess everyone has some musician friends who will help them for free, I know I do.
 
Perhaps there is a bunch of you people who would like to get together to work on a project like this.
 
Thanks 
 
Billy

 Well the most evident way of course is to score them in MIDI and use VSTi's as your band sounds. There are also many free and paid for MIDI files if you wanted to do a specific cover.  Might sound kind of complicated and is a bit, but there are many shortcuts to make things easier, such as using copy and paste to do redundant parts. If you want to make variations IMO, easier to paste a measure or part and make a few adjustments in piano roll, then to score the whole part over.
 If you're new to MIDI, I recommend checking it out for sure. You can input MIDI data several ways. By notation, in piano view, input from a MIDI controller. There is even third party software called "MIDI guitar" that you could input MIDI data with an electric guitar. With that your guitar can be used as any instrument you can think of.
 
There is also a program called "Band in the Box" that will automatically generate a pretty impressive track with just basic chord and time info.  Hope this helps.

I have been making and playing to my own backing tracks since the Atari 1020 hit the streets. 
Back then we had to drag the computer and 100lb of rack gear to gigs. Now I could do the same from a device smaller than a pack of smokes. 
Your choices are many these days. You can still play to live midi tracks or you can do like I've been doing for the last 20 years and play to audio tracks. 
 
Creating these track is time consuming and myself I can safely say it might account for the majority of my time spent working in my studio. Originally each song would take about 12-24 hours of work to create from scratch. Now I can cheat on some songs and download a file that might speed up the process. I say might because sometimes those download require as much work as starting from scratch. I would think my all time record for finishing a track might be 4 hours. 
So this is what you have to decide. Do you have the time to gather enough material to play 4 sets?   That's around 45 songs. I now have well over 150 and that took me 30 years :) 
45song  x @ say 6 hours per song = almost 300 hours. 
Then these songs need to be tested through your PA system and often need a re mix. 
You need all the songs to play at the same level and EQ. You need your band to be consistent. The good news is once accomplished you have a valuable asset at your command. 
 
You can see why most of the time you hear people using backing tracks it sounds bad. They didn't spend the time to perfect the tracks. They either buy them or download them , but most haven't a clue how to alter them to suit. 
 
Sonar is the best of all the DAW's I've tried for creating backing tracks because it comes with good soft synths. 
I add real bass to mine and keep it simple. Bass, Drums and sometimes some keyboard parts to anchor the song. I never bring those to the front. I let my guitar and voice be the focus. 
I now have a set of digital drums so I'm re doing a lot of my old "drum Machine" style tracks and spiffing them up with way better drums. But even that project is in it's second year and 3 versions of Sonar later I'm only at song number 46....
 
 

Cactus Music
I have been making and playing to my own backing tracks since the Atari 1020 hit the streets. 
Back then we had to drag the computer and 100lb of rack gear to gigs. Now I could do the same from a device smaller than a pack of smokes. 
Your choices are many these days. You can still play to live midi tracks or you can do like I've been doing for the last 20 years and play to audio tracks. 
 
Creating these track is time consuming and myself I can safely say it might account for the majority of my time spent working in my studio. Originally each song would take about 12-24 hours of work to create from scratch. Now I can cheat on some songs and download a file that might speed up the process. I say might because sometimes those download require as much work as starting from scratch. I would think my all time record for finishing a track might be 4 hours. 
So this is what you have to decide. Do you have the time to gather enough material to play 4 sets?   That's around 45 songs. I now have well over 150 and that took me 30 years :) 
45song  x @ say 6 hours per song = almost 300 hours. 
Then these songs need to be tested through your PA system and often need a re mix. 
You need all the songs to play at the same level and EQ. You need your band to be consistent. The good news is once accomplished you have a valuable asset at your command. 
 
You can see why most of the time you hear people using backing tracks it sounds bad. They didn't spend the time to perfect the tracks. They either buy them or download them , but most haven't a clue how to alter them to suit. 
 
Sonar is the best of all the DAW's I've tried for creating backing tracks because it comes with good soft synths. 
I add real bass to mine and keep it simple. Bass, Drums and sometimes some keyboard parts to anchor the song. I never bring those to the front. I let my guitar and voice be the focus. 
I now have a set of digital drums so I'm re doing a lot of my old "drum Machine" style tracks and spiffing them up with way better drums. But even that project is in it's second year and 3 versions of Sonar later I'm only at song number 46....
 
 

 I guess what you said is been my experience also except I have only been trying to make backing tracks myself for a short time.
 
I have the tracks to songs and a few albums we created in the studio that cost us a bunch of money, a real lot of money in fact. All that stuff is top quality and sounds as good as it does on the album. At a cost of about $3000 a song it sure a hell better sound good....lol
 
I have a few cover tune backing tracks that I put together that are ok but not what I would call professional. 
 
The issues also relate to live band gigs where the cover tunes we were doing were not that good for many reasons.
 
I tried using some of the tracks from our albums as backing with a new band....lol that was a funny train wreck.
 
I got comments like" YOU ACTUALLY WANT ME TO PLAY IN TIME AND KNOW WHERE I AM TOO COME IN AT"...LOL...LOL
 

Ha ha that's what I have also found. Bands are bands and for the most part that's the way most musicians are used to working that way. I play in a band right now too and are far as I can tell the songs are going to be a little different each time we play them. 
At first it through me off because I'm so used to the structure of a backing track. 
 
I once tried to get the bass player from a band we recorded an album with to play to the drum tracks from the album. No way. Train wreck. So I always stick to drums and bass because the bass drives the arrangement. I t worked fine once I gave him a guitar to strum. 
 
I can see the problem of using a bunch of real good tracks then slipping in a few not so great tracks. It might be noticeable.
I really need to get all mine fixed up because that's where I'm at. I really hear the old tracks and how dull they are compared to my latest when I use them. 
And now I am also in the processes of splitting the Bass tracks out. I had great success running the drums and keyboard in the right channel to the PA and the Bass in the Left channel to a bass amp. It's like having a real bass player in the backline. 

I have been doing this for years too, since the late 90s. So, nearly 20 years! Over the years, of course as music tech got better, the quality of my tracks got better, but they do take hours of painstaking work, esp. from scratch. These days, I'm rapt, because I use the website karaoke version dot com. They offer custom backing tracks in 320kb MP3 files, where all the instrument tracks are separated in a mix. Then you can alter the keys, also the volumes of the separate tracks and do what I do, download the tracks individually, then load them into a DAW, and have them playback as a live mix!

They sell each of the custom tracks for only $2.99 each song! The cheapest I've found on the net. Most of them are recorded very professionally, and they update their repetoir all the time. It has been a blessing for me, as I play solo shows live, just playing acoustic and vocals/harmonica. I use an app on my iPad Air called auria, which is a great iOS DAW. I upload all the individual tracks of the songs into auria, then I play them back through my portable PA. It gives me total control of the whole mix, as I can adjust the levels live, and also pan the instruments where I like. The website also has click tracks recorded for every song, that you can download, enter into your mix, and hard pan it to use as a timing guide!

Interesting thread, I was unaware this is beginning to be a common thing. We have only played a few songs out this way and just getting started, but me and a young female singer is attempting to go this route. We have found a few titles on karaoke version. com but there are quite a few I had to do my best making Karaoke in Sonar, with that Roland plug. My main setback is there are several that she wants to do that I can't locate a MIDI or karaoke for so it looks like I have quite a few I have to build from scratch. This is me and her at an early practice last year with one of the few MIDI's I have built up.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/peqlsdpu659yv8i/nobofies%20final.wmv?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4pijokp84o8evy6/Zombie%20fnl.MP4?dl=0
 
 
To be honest I'm a bit dubious about it and was planning on trying to talk her into going the whole live band thing because I'm unsure how it would go over around here. Good and encouraging to see others are making it work.