How to slow down a song to learn it

Why slow beats guessing at full speed

At full speed, a hard run goes past before you've heard it. You fill the gaps with something close, and after twenty tries the close version is the one your hands know. Slowed down, each note has room: you can hear which string, which finger, which syllable lands on the beat, and you can play it right the first time instead of fixing it later.

The trick is to slow the recording, not just your playing. Playing slowly against a full-speed record means you're never really playing along. With the song itself slowed, the groove, the chords under the line and the singer's phrasing all stretch with you, so what you practise slowly is the same music you'll play fast.

Find the tempo first

Knowing the song's BPM turns vague speeds into numbers you can track. Read it with the key and BPM finder (it says probably and gives a second answer when a beat could be counted at half or double speed; pick the count that matches where your foot lands). Then every speed is a percentage of it: 70% of a 120 BPM song is 84 BPM. Write the number down with the date each time you practise and you'll see the climb over a week.

The tempo also tells you how long a bar lasts, which is what you need to set a tight loop. At slow speeds a bar gets long quickly:

Pick a starting speed you can play cleanly

Speed goes as low as 50% here, and the pitch stays where it was, so you're still learning the song in its real key. Don't start as slow as it goes; start at the fastest speed where you can play the hard part with no mistakes. On a part that's just out of reach, that's often a little over half speed.

Test it with one pass. If you stumble, drop a step. If it's easy, go up one. The first speed of the session should feel slightly slow, never like a struggle.

How the player slows a song without changing its pitch

Loop the hard bar

Most songs aren't hard all the way through; one or two bars are. Loop only those. A short loop gets you far more repetitions in ten minutes than playing the whole song, and every one of them is on the part you can't yet play.

Start the loop a beat or two before the hard notes and end it a beat after them. Starting early lets you land into the difficult spot the way you will in the song, instead of starting cold on it. When that bar is clean, widen the loop by a bar on each side so the join into the next part gets practised too.

Drag A and B over the waveform, or tap Set A and Set B as the song plays, and turn the loop on. Leave a beat of silence at your end if you need a breath before going round again.

Build it back up: a speed ladder

Once the loop is clean, raise the speed a step at a time. Each step should be small enough that the part still feels under control; if it falls apart, the step was too big, so drop back one. End the session one step below where it fell apart, so the last thing your hands did was play it right.

Here's what a ladder looks like on a song at 120 BPM. Don't expect to climb all of it in one sitting: a few steps a day is steady progress on a part that started out of reach.

Let the speed trainer do the climbing

Stepping the speed by hand works, but it breaks your concentration every few loops. The speed trainer on the Practice tab does it for you: it starts the loop at a speed you set and adds a little on every pass, or every few passes, until it reaches your target. Set its start to your clean speed from above, not lower, and its step smaller if the jumps catch you out.

Turn the metronome switch on while it runs. The click follows the speed, so it stays with the slowed song, and it shows you whether you're rushing as the loop gets faster.

What each trainer setting does

Hear the part on its own

Sometimes the problem isn't speed: you can't hear the line at all under the rest of the band. Splitting the song fixes that. Solo the bass to learn a bass line, mute the drums to hear the guitar riff, or take the voice out to hear the piano under it. After a split, Speed and Key on the Practice tab apply to the split's mix, so you can slow the soloed part down too.

The reverse is just as useful once you know the part: take your own instrument out of the mix and play it in the gap, slowed at first, then at full speed.

Make a backing track with your part taken out

Learn it by ear: a routine

1. 1Loop one short phrase, a few notes, at a speed where you can sing it back.
2. 2Sing or hum it until you can do it without the record. If you can't sing it, you can't yet hear it clearly enough to play it.
3. 3Find the first note on your instrument, then the next, one at a time, checking each against the loop.
4. 4Write it down in whatever you use: tab, note names, a voice memo of you playing it.
5. 5Play it along with the slowed loop, then climb the ladder.
6. 6Join it to the phrase before it, and move on to the next phrase.

When slow sounds strange

The further you slow a recording, the more any time-stretch starts to sound smeared: drum hits lose their snap and held notes can warble a little. That's the stretch filling in time that wasn't in the recording, and it's normal. It doesn't change the notes, so it doesn't matter for learning which notes to play.

It does matter for rhythm. If the feel is what you're learning, practise near full speed with the metronome on, and save the very slow speeds for fast runs where it's the notes, not the groove, you're after.

Practise the rhythm with a metronome