Have you ever played with an old tape recorder or a turn table? I’m young, but I guess I’m dating even myself by saying that I have… technology changes so fast! Those devices were set to play back at a specific speed. If that speed varied, then you would immediately hear the pitch of the music change. If it sped up, the pitch increased, and if it slowed down, the pitch dropped.
Traditionally, this has been the classic problem anytime anyone wanted to change the speed of a portion of music. By doing so, you’d be changing the pitch at the same time.
Now however, we have software that automatically compensates and allows us to reduce the speed of an audio clip without changing its pitch.
This is incredibly useful for musicians trying to figure out a difficult piece of music from a recording, like a really sweet guitar lick for example. Software such as Song Surgeon is capable of selecting a portion of the audio clip and creating a loop around that portion, so just that bit will play back over and over and over again, allowing you to focus all your time just learning the tough spot in question.
Song Surgeon also gives you full control over that loop, allowing you to slow it down pretty much as far as you want, while still retaining the correct pitch. This allows you to play along with a normally fast piece of music at a reduced, more manageable tempo, all while keeping your instrument in standard tuning.
–> Get a Free Trial of Song Surgeon Here <–
For a really difficult piece of music, you might find you need to slow the song down by 50 or even 75%, however once you find a tempo that you can play along with, you know you’re on the path to mastering it. From this point, it becomes a simple matter to push yourself along by increasing the tempo by say 10% each time you master the piece. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself able to play along at full tempo, and you’ll have done this in the same tuning the entire time. Pretty cool stuff!
The flip side of this software is that you can also change the pitch of the audio file, without changing the tempo. There are several benefits to this.
Many of the older recordings were done on tapes, and as such, ended up formalized in a slightly different tempo (and thus pitch) from how they were played. When you go back to play along with those old recordings, you might find yourself having to retune your guitar by a quarter step, or something goofy like that. This isn’t a problem with newer recordings on CD.
Software such as Song Surgeon allows you to quickly adjust the pitch of the song into standard tuning, so that you’re able to play along without having to re-tune your guitar all the time. A major bonus if you like jamming along to older recordings.