Slowdown Music Software: 3 Reasons Why Tab Sucks and What You Can Do About It!

In days gone by us oldies had to use a turntable and learn everything off LP's and 45's. We could change the speed of the player and that would slow down the music by about 50% to learn those faster bits. But it would also lower the pitch of the music by one octave also.

So anything you learnt off the record you would have to transpose up an octave.

That all made it quite difficult, especially if you were a beginner guitar player trying to learn songs, chords, solos, licks and riffs.

These days, tab has replaced the old 'needle on needle off'—Karate Kid— routine of old for most learners. But there's a big disadvantage to using tab instead of records to learn off. Several in fact:

3 Reasons Tab Sucks!

1. Tab is mostly inaccurate! It's generally written by beginners, or, inexperienced guitar players just learning to find their way around the guitar. Bit like the 'blind leading the blind' really.
2. Most beginners grab tab off the net and try to play their favorite songs. Trouble is, those songs are well beyond the abilities of beginners. That results in knowing little bits of lots of songs but not being able to play one song completely from beginning to end. (You can watch a video that show what I mean here. "Your Stairway to Guitar Playing Heaven".)
3. But the biggest disadvantage is, that with tab, you aren't training your ears to really 'listen' to the music and figure out exactly what you are hearing and where to play it on the guitar fretboard.

Music is all about your ears…

You listen to music… you don't watch it.

Your ears are attached to your head. So your ears and your head (thinking) are the most important things to use when learning to play guitar. Your hands and fingers are just the motor-skills. But your head and ears are how you really learn to play guitar.

In the main, you learn to play music with your eyes and your ears. Eyes to read music and watch other guitarists. Ears to listen and learn to play what you hear.

But far too many people these days use their eyes too much to read tab only, and hardly use their ears to learn music at all. Especially beginners.

So you really need to be using your ears to listen to music and try to figure out how to play it. After all, that's the ultimate goal of any musician worth his salt.

Learning to play be ear is something you should do right from day 1. (Learn more about playing guitar by ear here.) It's something you should be doing right from day 1… when you start learning guitar.

Now after you can play the basic chords, and the bar chords you should start trying to learn songs off the Cd's, or mp3's you have on your computer.

But you may find it difficult to stop and start a CD at the place you are up to. And you can't really slow them down very well. That's where software to slow down music WITHOUT changing the pitch comes in real handy.

The absolute best slowdown music software is called Transcribe! (Click the link to download a free trial.)

1. This excellent software can be used to slow down music to any speed without changing the pitch.
2. Select portions and loop them over and over until you get it. Name your loops so you can replay them at any time.
3. Use many varieties of sound files: mp3, ogg, wav etc
4. Connect a pedal to your computer via usb and stop and start it as you like.
5. and many more powerful features not available in any other slow down music software

So grab a free trial download of Transcribe and try it out for yourself. You'll be amazed at how fast you learn.