Category: Guitar Software

If you want to learn to play guitar for free there’s plenty of software available to help you. This article will enable you to define for yourself how to approach learning the guitar and guide you in setting up the time and space necessary to make solid musical progress.

Imagine yourself sitting down to play the guitar. You want to play to your own musical standards and to make music that impresses your audience. You will play from beginning to end without a hitch. Your attention will be on the music, not nervously anticipating the bits that you can “scrape through” when you are alone in your room but could be your undoing in front of an audience.

To learn to play guitar with a high degree of fluency, the first free resource you will need is time. Even if you have a busy daily schedule you can find say, half an hour to set aside to learning guitar. Think about what you do during the day. After dinner for instance, do you sit staring mindlessly at the television? Could you get up a little earlier in the morning to play guitar? Failing to seriously think about when you are going to practice the guitar will make the other elements of your guitar education more difficult.

Once you have worked when you will practice the guitar each day, you can contemplate the basic needs behind learning music. You can see in your imagination how you want to play guitar, so how do you go about getting the music into your head and your fingers?

An essential piece of equipment you need by your side is your guitar tuner. With free guitar tuners available to download, there’s no excuse not to be in tune. I recommend the AP Guitar Tuner. It has a great visual guide to make sure you get your guitar in tune with a minimum of fuss.

Whether you already read standard musical notation or you will be using guitar tablature, you need to go to your friendly neighborhood search engine and look for a free music notation program called TablEdit. Guitarists record arrangements of songs using this program and share it with other guitar players on the internet. You download the software in a zip file and install it on your computer.
Now go to your search engine again and type in the name of the song you want to learn followed by “tabledit”. If your request is not too obscure, you will get a number of web pages where you can download your song. As an example, type “classical gas tabledit” into a search engine and you will be rewarded with over one-hundred-and-fifty results. The only drawback with the free version of the program is you can’t edit and save the music you are learning.

Another free guitar notation program is called Powertab, so if you can’t find a Tabledit file for the piece you want, try your search using “power tab”.

Okay, you have your software, now you need to sit down with yourself and let the notation program play the song. Get a good grip on how the song sounds. Then start to learn the notes in whatever size chunks you need. Break it into licks, bars, half bars, whatever, but don’t ride over any bits that are difficult for you. The ultimate aim is to perform a series of small movements, each one leading to the next.

If you have difficulty with any part of the song, play it slowly several times on your notation program until you can hear it in your head. Then try it slowly on the guitar.

Finally, if you can’t find a TablEdit or Powertab arrangement of your song, the latest version or Apple’s Quicktime has the ability to slow down any music without altering the pitch. All you need then is a sound file and a tab or sheet music of your piece and you’re ready to rock!

Technorati Tags: learn to play guitar for free, free guitar notation program

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Computer programs that slow down audio and/or video files to allow guitarists to learn riffs and solos are a basic tool for anyone who wants to learn to play guitar. So here’s the major players in the music slowdown field:
Slo Mo Director
Slo Mo Director slows down video so you can see and hear what you want to learn. Watching HOW a guitarist plays certainly adds a dimension to hearing WHAT he plays
“Learn at least 3 times faster than normal watching the same video in a completely different way!
The best part about using video as a learning tool is the fact that you can watch as many repetitions as you want. The teacher or instructor in the video never gets bored or tired and will keep repeating the lessons every time you hit the play button.
But quite often in video lessons, particularly music lessons, the action is just a bit too quick - especially a tricky little intricate bit. Wouldn’t it be great if that bit was not only repeated but played back more slowly!
Slow motion video is used in many fields involving learning motor skills - Piano - Dancing - Skating - Snowboarding - Hockey - Martial Arts - Magic Tricks - Saxophone - Guitar.
With software for slowing down video you can rip your existing DVD’s using FREE software that you can download from the internet, save them as .WMV and manipulate them with slow mo software programs.
Likewise you can capture Streaming Videos from Websites using FREE software, save them as .WMV files and open them with software for slowing down video.”
Slo Mo Director
Slowgold
“Do you want to learn how to play the hot licks from any CD, MP3 file, or Wave file? With the World Wide Woodshed’s acclaimed music software, it’s easy! With just a couple of mouse clicks, you’ll be playing along with a loop of any phrase from any CD, MP3 file, or Wave file at any speed, at the original pitch, with great sound quality.
SlowGold offers a ton of additional features (see Product Comparison Table) that the hardware units don’t even begin to offer, including pitch shifting, so that singers can transpose recordings to their own key and players can retune recordings that may not be tuned to concert pitch. And bass players can transpose recordings up by an octave to pop out the bass parts even while they slow them down!
SlowBlast! is for musicians who only need its slowdown features on an occasional basis.
Both programs are available to try for free.”
Read more about Slowgold and Slowblast here.
Twist And Burn
“If you want to practise along with guitar or other musical instrument, it can be helpful to slow down music.
With DJ Twist & Burn dj mixing software, you can easily add a sound, and play it back at any tempo without altering the pitch!
1. Add a sound
2. Right click on the sound and select “Edit BPM/Pitch Settings…”
3. Click “Beat Match”
4. Select a new tempo!
5. Click OK
Play the slowed down music. You can also speed up the music, if you don’t care to play it so slowed down.
You can burn this to an audio CD or render it to an MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA file!
Twist And Burn
Slow Notes is a free music slowdown program which needs a flash player to operate. The program can open .MP3, .WAV and .AIF audio files. The developer is working on adding support for more file types.
Slow Notes
Riffmaster
“Slow down music to a pace you can play without changing the pitch, and our loop feature allows you to play any Riff or phrase over and over! Also the zoom feature allows you to find the phrase you want to work on - right down to the note!
Rip audio directly off a cd and save as mp3 or wav! We’ve all heard that the best guitarists can play by ear, Right?
Here is your chance to catch up!
27 seconds - that’s all it takes to install our program, then load your favorite track, slow it down and start jamming with the best of the best!”
Slow Down Guitar Music!

Technorati Tags: slow down audio, music slowdown, free music slowdown program

If you want to learn to play a guitar for free using nothing but videos downloaded from YouTube and similar sites, you might want to consider a new piece of software which at the moment is available for free on a trial basis.
It’s nice to be able to download videos of your favorite guitar players to watch and learn their licks. The problem is it’s not always so easy to actually see what the guitarist in the video is doing. Yes, you can keep winding it back and replaying the tricky bits, but that doesn’t always yield the insight you’re looking for.
Computer software for slowing down audio files has been available for years, but Slo Mo Director is amazing software that manipulates video so that anyone can learn at least 3 times faster than normal. The idea is that you are able to slow down the bits of video you are having trouble with, and repeat it at a pace you can cope with while you learn.
If you want the full details, there’s a video demo of the software in action and a link to the free trial.

Technorati Tags: learn to play a guitar for free, YouTube, Slo Mo Director