G’day friends,
I’ve been away from Irish Trad for a few years (but have never lost my love for it) .
I’m keen to learn some new Flute tunes and am wondering what people are using these days in the way of ‘tune slow down’ software.
Is The Amazing Slow Downer still the one to use ? .. or what’s the latest device people use these days ?
Best regards from OZ .. Charlie ..
YouTube has settings controls which allow you to speed up or slow down a video (preserving audio pitch/tuning). So if there’s a nice tune there but played at full on pace, you can slow down to work out the notes.
Hi I have used the ASD for years. It’s still going and it is brilliant!
I am sure there are others avialible and others will comment.
Good luck.
Llig used to say that we needed an “Amazing Speed Upper” for Martin Hayes tracks.
🙂
Actually, Transcribe will do this and it’s still on the go too. It works fine for me although I use it less often these days.
Windows Media Player and Audacity both do the job and are free.
Transcribe is what I use (and have used for donkeys).
Hi Charlie - hope all is well with you, welcome back. Will you be going to the “Nash” this year ? There’s a slight chance………………
Remind me of your address in a private message, and I’ll send you some recordings to keep you busy !
All the best, Kenny
I have an older version of Quicktime Player (version 7) on a mac, it has slow down, pitch shift and other controls.
There’s also VLC which is free - Transcribe is very good but not free.
There is also this free web-based audio time stretcher/pitch shifter:
https://29a.ch/timestretch/?fbclid=IwAR1pNi4bS8AbzMcfteL5YN4qBgdezy6K6xGvBQLt4DCa9zP0g766nqsZg8g
My old standby is free: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bestpractice/
I’ve used a few of those but find that best for slowing down with least distortion is my phone (android) - in the music settings you can adjust the playing speed. Nothing new to download or fuss around with.
Dia dhaoibh! Greetings all!
This technology is amazing and, maybe to my detriment and maybe others’ relief, something I’ve never had.
To use this you have to do the same as I do which is to listen.
Once you have a language there are dialects and accents which, likewise, are reflected in our music. So it’s more a question of learning to listen like you are hearing a person speaking.
It’s a lot more fun, and certainly richer, to learn from a real person, learn the nuances, and definitely the provenance of the tune.
Slow downers, or for that matter, speed uppers, cannot do that. There are members here who’ll recall tunes I’ve given them in this way, and what wonderful moments we shared. And for me, a treasure chest of those too.
For me the people you play with are ‘The Session’, and I believe that to be the essence of our music.
A recording cannot not give you that.
So, persevere and if there’s a tune you want or like, ask one of your friends, fellow players, to go through it with you; it’s amazingly easy and, better still, so rewarding.
All the best
Brian x
Zoukboy,
I’m a huge fan of Learn That Song (Remix Edition) for iPhone--formerly called iLift. The beauty of it is that in addition to slowing tunes down, and looping sections of them, you can shift the tunes up and down stepwise. It’s the reason I bought an iPhone.
Bothy1932
As a quite recent newbie to ITM, I delve into the threads on this site almost every evening, and I often find some very interesting stuff of course.
Occasionally, and just occasionally, I might throw in some comment which may or may not, be useful, or even deep and meaningful.
I’ve been an active muso for around 60 years, and never before have I heard of a “Slow Downer”.
What an amazing tool that would be for someone like me who can’t find all the dot information that I would like and doesn’t have a lot of real competent players around me.
At the moment my best source of info is YouTube, so it appears that I now have more work that I can get into.
Thank you all. 🙂
"For me the people you play with are ‘The Session’, and I believe that to be the essence of our music.
A recording cannot not give you that.
So, persevere and if there’s a tune you want or like, ask one of your friends, fellow players, to go through it with you; it’s amazingly easy and, better still, so rewarding."
So are you saying you don’t record anything? how do you remember the tune you’ve learnt from your friends, fellow players etc. a few days or weeks later?
I find slowed down recordings of good players are good for studying their techniques, variations etc. I couldn’t do that from memory.
I used ASD for quite a few years. But recently, I have only been using AnyTune Pro (only on Apple MacOS and iOS devices, unfortunately). It’s pretty full-featured. You can record in the app, instead of having to import (which it can do too, of course). And it has a ton of features. Very simple looping, editing, EQ, band filtering, pitch change, tempo change, etc. It even has a fun ‘Re-Frame’ filter that lets you draw a frame around what frequencies you want to allow or block, which allows you to do things like remove the piano from Michael Coleman recordings (leaving you a pretty tinny sounding fiddle, but at least you can figure out what he was playing without all the distraction of the piano).
Thank you all so much for your help and advice.
A couple of folks here have said ask one of your friends to help with new tunes… wouldn’t I love to have a friend nearby to help ! Here in rural Australia ,the closest person to me who likes this Music, is a 50 minute drive away.She plays Harp and Concertina and we play together every couple of weeks.. The closest Fluter is about 2 1/2 hours away … so we soldier on with CD’s and dots ..
Anyways,after a bit of thought and research,I’ve decided to with Transcribe… should do the job.
Cheers from OZ ….
Audacity good, Transcribe good, but not free. Those two do it for me. Transcribe if I want to work something out ( to write it down…). Audacity if I want to shift pitch. VLC or audacity for actual playback, though VLC is only good for a certain amount of slowing down - for more I need to use audacity. Though once I have a tune worked out slowly, I rarely play along to anything other than VLC. VLC I use for playback, even when slowing down is not involved.
Audacity I also use if I am working on something I have recorded myself and need to bash it about a bit.
I like audacity for my computer and Audipo for my android phone. Audipo allows you to drop markers at various points in the tune and loop play between them. Also pitch and tempo adjustments. Love it.
Hi Gromit
Thanks for your question, and also the informative comments about variations and techniques. I’m sure that’s a magnificent and valuable resource.
In answer to your question about recording equipment, facilities, no I don’t have anything like that. However I am blessed with a good memory. It’s freaky, I don’t just remember tunes, but phone numbers, international dialling codes, dates; you name it and it’s there.
There are members here I’ve sessioned with many times and they all do, maybe did, the same. Learn by ear from the player. I used to go along to the Liverpool Ceilidh Band practice on Tuesday nights; it was a free dance and the musicians, masters all, were so generous and encouraging. I was quite poor then and sometimes would walk the 7 miles each way to play. They were lovely people and one with whom I stayed in touch until his death was Seán McNamara.
But apart from all the brilliant sessions in Liverpool I started to travel all over the British Isles so that I was exposed to so many different repertoires. I played in London at The Favourite for years, and as I posted recently, up in Glasgow with Jimmy McHugh. That was a 100 miles hitch each way.
All those tunes were learnt by ear, no tape recorders. It’s an old tradition of many peoples round the world.
When I teach I make sure to play those tunes in the session so that the learner reinforces it. That’s the secret.
The first time, very much a novice, I played with a certain brilliant flute player, after the gig we had a few tunes. We played Jackie Coleman’s. After 3 times through I stopped.
He said “Play it again and again so that you know every note, so that it’s part of you.”
So we played through Jackie Coleman’s 29 times!
And it was the same with all the musicians, whether learning or sharing.
And I really do mean it, it’s a lovely way to learn and share the music.
I hope that’s given you some insight into my method of remembering and playing.
All the best
Brian x
AnyTune Pro sounds interesting, but I haven’t tried it. I have used ASD for several years and like it for two reasons. First and most important, it has the best sound quality for slowed down tunes I’ve come across. Second, it is easy to use. Audacity is too complicated and I’ve never been able to use it for that reason, although I do use it for bare bones recording. For short bits, I use QuickTime Player 7 and VLC although the sound quality on these when playing a tune slowed down is dreadful.
People may find this useful. I don’t think you can slow down videos in the YouTube phone app but if you open YouTube as a desktop version on your phone browser you can then slow down as on a PC.
Audio Stretch on iOS is also excellent.
I use Riffstation (https://pro.riffstation.com/features_page/) and find it very useful.
ASD for iOS is a great tool to have on your smartphone. I don’t know whether its available for android.
It can play the files on your phone, your music on iCloud, your Spotify playlists etc.
I used to use it a lot on my iMac but this work just as well, maybe even better. It remembers all your settings (even per track)
There’s a good android app called “Music Speed Changer” I’m fairly sure it was free. It has a loop facility, tempo and pitch change. Not as sophisticated as ASD but it works
I second the recommendation for AnyTune, it’s great. Also a friend turned me onto this website that will loop and slow down sections of youtube videos: https://loopvideos.com/ Youtube itself will slow down, but with this site you can slow down just the section you’re working on.
How can you input a tune on the session into amazing slowdowner?
Wiley, Amazing Slow Downer works with audio files. You could play the MIDI version of a tune on the Session and record it with Audacity. Save the file as an mp3 or wav and you can then load it into ASD. However it’s far simpler to use one of the ABC programs such as ABCexplorer or EasyABC. Most of these allow you to play the ABC file and to adjust the speed. You could also change the Q: field in the ABC to alter the tempo.
I’ve been working on a trad tunes app to which I’ve added a new looping feature…
For certain tunes, you can play a youtube video of the tune, then like Amazing Slow Downer, set a loop start & end point to practice a phrase in the tune. You can also push the loop forward or back to move to the next phrase.
Example here: https://www.tunesource.net/tune/1008/congress-reel-the
click the “Loop and slow down video” button below the video.
Any feedback would be much appreciated as I’m still tweaking and improving it….