If you’re like me, you get a lot of learning done on YouTube, but isolating a passage and repeating it, let alone notating it in some way, is difficult if not impossible. Not any more! Check out SoundSlice.
Want to learn more about the best ways to practice? Get an e-mail with a discount code when The Practice of Practice is published (June, 2014). To learn more about the book, check out a sample from The Practice of Practice.
Guitarist and programmer Adrian Holovaty (he often plays rhythm guitar in Swing Gitan, just voted best jazz band in Chicago), with help from designer PJ Macklin created SoundSlice.
SoundSlice is a fantastically useful tool geared towards guitarists, but it’s useful for anybody who learns by watching video. Adrian’s done many cool things as a programmer (check his site), and has an album out of his most popular fingerstyle tunes here, most of which you can also find on SoundSlice, like the Beatles tune, Yesterday. Check out the link to Yesterday for a good example of how the site works.
SoundSlice takes advantage of HTML5 abilities, allowing you to slow down video to half speed, as well as annotate using text, tabs, chords, and, coming soon, standard notation. Also coming soon is a Pro version that will allow further refinements in slowing down playback and other goodies. When you first create an account and load a video, there is an excellent walkthrough that shows you all the features.
I can’t embed SoundSlice here, but check out the links below to see excellent examples of how it works:
- The Stephane Wrembel tune Bistro Fada (played by Adrian), featured in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. Wrembel spoke with me for an hour or so about how he practices, a fascinating and useful approach. I’m working up that audio and it should be up here some time this summer.
- One of my own transcriptions of a Dizzy Gillespie tune, Birk’s Works, on which you can hear my guitar, trumpet and egg-shaker playing. I’m still trying to figure how to easily put in trumpet fingerings.
- Here’s the SoundSlice “About Page“
Or, for a complete overview of the program, watch Adrian’s talk on SoundSlice below:
Want to learn more about the best ways to practice? Get an e-mail with a discount code when The Practice of Practice is published (June, 2014). To learn more about the book, check out a sample from The Practice of Practice.
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- A little game to learn all the notes on your instrument (becomingthemusic.wordpress.com)
- Blue Bossa solo jazz guitar backing track Free mp (robertcontinews.wordpress.com)
The Practice of Practice 
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