Are you still trying to figure out riffs, licks or solos the old fashion way by listening to a song at full speed and then trying to catch all the notes?
Allow me bring you up to date and let you in on the secret tool that every guitarist should have in their gig-bag of tricks.
It's not a new technology but there are still some who haven't tried it yet. It's music and tab slow down software.
Before this technology was available, guitarist would try slowing down their record players to try and pick out the notes that Jimi Hendrix was playing so they could learn it themselves.
The problem with this method was that not only was it really hard to accomplish, but the pitch of the notes and music got lower as the record went slower. This made it hard to know exactly what note was being played even though it was now a lot slower. So you had to keep speeding it up and slowing it down and as you could imagine was a frustrating task.
Even with cassette tapes or CD's you would have to keep stopping, rewinding and restarting the music until you figured out the parts of the song that you wanted to learn.
Enter looping technology. Looping replays certain segments of music over and over again for you until you stop it. Of course this is nothing new these days either but it's a basic feature on music slowdown software programs.
Thanks to this technology both problems are solved. We can now slow a song down while also keeping the pitch of the song normal, and then loop any section to repeat over and over again so we can learn it.
Brilliant!
So why do you need this software when you could just get the tabs or standard music for a song? Well, sometimes the tabs are wrong or they just can't be found for a certain song and some people can't read standard music.
I suppose if there is any down side to the technology, it would be the fact that you can not be tone deaf to use the software. You will need to develop your ear training so you can hear tones correctly. But the good news is that just by using the software it will help you with that as well!
If you were to interview some of the best guitar players you will find that most of them learned to play guitar by ear first. It can become the most accurate way for you to learn your favorite songs.
And it's not just for guitar music. You can slow down any type of music to learn any type of instrument including vocals.
So if your ready to stop learning the hard way, check out a music slow down software program.
