Amazing Slow Downer
This sweetly intuitive program for ear-playing musicians slows down the tune without altering the pitch and/or plays the tune in any key you like. Crooked & complicated melody, complex ornamentation, blistering speed? With this you can tune it to your instrument, slow it down, isolate the tricky parts, put them on loops and play along with them over and over until you get it right. And marvel at how inventive and agile your favorite jazzmen/fiddlers/pipers/bluesmen/etc could and can be. If you play like this, I need say very little more: this is our wet dream, as big an invention as written music or the phonograph.
Works directly from the CD drive, or with any MP3/AIFF/Wave/AAC/M4A files on your HD, iTunes friendly, originally written for the Mac, now available for Windows as well. Download the demo, and see how it works; I believe you'll agree that the $45 price is an excellent value. I used to pay much more for those clunky old Maranzes that were nowhere near as useful, and then broke.
This cool tool has opened a whole realm of hard tunes to me. It's that social thing -- you need to play with people who are better than you, but you really don't want to waste the patience of good musicians by making them to go over that tricky part for you *again.* It's relaxing to let the machine do the machine work, and relaxing makes for good music.
The program is frequently upgraded, and upgrades are always free. (There's a note about "major upgrades may entail a slight fee", but the OSX version was free to people who'd bought classic.) A couple of times I had to email for help and was fixed up immediately apparently by the program's author, a Swedish musician and programmer named Rolf.
-- Tim Jennings
Amazing Slow Downer
$50
Available from
Roni Music
Favorite (15)
travis
reaper does this and a whole lot more. free to try, $50 to buy.
http://www.cockos.com/reaper/
accent
I own amazing slowdowner, and it is awesome. I am a professional musician, and I use it for all kinds of stuff. To rehearse with, to transcribe, whatever, its fantastic!!
Everyone should own it.
David
I love the amazing slow downer. I have learned some amazing licks using it.
Dave
Laral
I'm learning to play blues harp so I've tried all the slow-downers including Amazing Slow Downer, Guitar and Drum Trainer 3, SlowGold, Transcribe!, and some other minor ones, and I have to say without reservation that Transcribe! (http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/screenshots.html) is the clear winner. Its simple user interface is completely intuitive and easy to use. To select a section of music you want repeated, all you have to do is drag the cursor over the section of the displayed waveform, choose a preset speed from 15% to 150% and play. You can add markers to the sections you want to come back to later as well. Compare that with Amazing Slow Downer's awkward interface. First of all there is no displayed waveform, which, to me, is a minimum requirement for this type of software. So to select the start and end point of a section, you have to play the piece to AUDIBLY locate the section you want and then jockey with two sliders to set the endpoints -- a very time consuming and annoying process. To select the speed there is another slider that makes it almost impossible to select whole number increments or repeat a desired speed. No marker capability so you have to go through this awkward procedure every time you want to practice a different section. This is absolutely the worst of the slowdowners. While the other two program do have a graphical waveform display, they are very awkward to use as well.
no
I'm not paying 50 dollars for something that should be free.
Tony
In addition to the "slow downers," Intelliscore (http://www.intelliscore.net) is a program that takes a different approach. Rather than slow down the music, it helps you transcribe by taking your CD, MP3, etc. and converting it to a MIDI file. The MIDI file contains the notes played and can be opened directly in notation software so you can see the notes in sheet music format.