TL; DR; Here it is:
Slowing Down Music, what’s out there?
When it comes to practicing the guitar… Most of the time I’m working on a specific song. My teacher has given me the music for it and I’m playing along with the original song… slowed down, especially for learning solos. It’s essential to slow down the original music as part of the learning process, then you speed it up when you’ve got your chops going.
There’s a lot of options out there nowadays. Even you Youtube now allows you to slow down tracks in .05 increments on a scale between 0 and 1 and I do use this all the time. Another great option is Amazing Slow Downer. It has a lot of detail including changing the pitch of a song. Sidenote: The ASD mobile app used to link with Spotify BUT they recently lost the feature because Spotify stopped supporting it. Its a real shame.
Motivation
There are two major features that I wanted from a practice app, that none of these products have:
- Saving State – When it comes to practice, you want to remove as much friction as possible. I don’t want to have to remember where in the song the solo is. I want to open my practice right where I left off.
- Multiple Players – I want to save state for multiple different sections. Maybe I’m learning the intro and the solo. More often than not I want to work on a tricky part of a solo and go back and forth between that and playing the whole solo.
That’s why I created Practice Makes Performer:
Practice Makes Performer
Practice Makes Performer is a tool designed to help musicians of all kinds improve their skills by customizing the playback of any song, you can:
- Create multiple players for your track and save the state of each
- Adjust the tempo as you’re learning
- Select specific parts of the song to focus on and seamlessly loop these parts to practice until you get it right.
- Plus, you can save your progress and easily resume your practice session at any time
- Integrated with Google Drive. To upload your mp3 files, simply upload the file to google drive and follow the in app instructions to link it to your account
Feedback
I hope others will find this tool as helpful as I have and I hope it makes your practice sessions smoother.
I’m just releasing this into the wild now so please let me know if you find bugs or if there are other features you would like to see included.
You can view the Project on Github.
Robert David West 