From the Journal:
Slowing Music Down with QuickTime
One of the things that I love to do in my free time is play guitar, and I’ve been doing it for over 12 years now. When I first started out, I was fairly diligent with my practice schedule but as life got busier and busier, that time slowly became a distant memory. Lately I’ve been making myself find more time to practice, but it still isn’t as much as I’d like, so I’ve had to find ways to make what little time I do spend practicing as efficient as possible.
Contributing to my dwindling practice time was a real lack of direction and purpose — I’d just play the same old songs and riffs that I’d already mastered over and over again, and really didn’t try to stretch or grow my ability. This led to fairly uninspiring practice times that usually only lasted about 5 or 10 minutes. With my recent “resurgence” in practice though, I’ve really focused on learning new things, and finding pieces of music that are beyond my comfort level. The only way you’re going to get better at anything is by challenging and stretching yourself, right?
When you’re first learning a complicated song or that sweet solo you’ve always wanted to be able to play, it usually helps if you’re able to slow down that song so that you can break it down piece by piece and really hear all of the intricacies. Once you figure out what’s going on in all the parts, it helps to turn the music off and just play each piece slowly until you’ve at least memorized all the patterns and how they fit together.
But what happens once you’ve learned all the parts and you’re ready to try and play along with the original song? Well, if you’re truly stretching to play something that’s outside of your current skill level, chances are you won’t be able to play at full speed right away, and that can be discouraging. Rest assured though, there are tools that can help!
One such tool that I’ve been using recently (and just discovered some functionality with) is Apple’s free QuickTime Player. QuickTime will allow you to slow any track (or video) down to ½ of its original speed. The best part about QuickTime’s ability to slow things down though, is that it allows you to play a track at any speed, which means as you get better you can progressively increase the speed of the track as you play along until you’ve mastered it enough to be able to play at full speed.
Many software programs will allow you to play something at half speed, but few basic programs let you control the precise speed of playback the way QuickTime does. QuickTime’s functionality is great because the difference between half and full speed is quite drastic and I find it extremely beneficial to play along with the music (as opposed to just a metronome). This allows me to hear the beat and all the other instruments along with my guitar, giving me a much better feel for how to play and where the notes land in relation to the beats.
So, if you want to slow down some music to practice along with, open that track in QuickTime, hit Command () + K to open the A/V Controls (or go to the Window menu and select “Show A/V Controls”) and play around with the “Playback Speed” slider to get the tempo you’re looking for. Also, if you’re really brave, you can fiddle with the song’s pitch by moving the “Pitch Shift” slider if you want to play along with the song in a different key.
Oh, and one other nice thing about QuickTime is that it can open pretty much any file format, including your Protected AAC (non-iTunes+) audio files from the iTunes Music Store.
