Guitar Practice
Improve your guitar practice with tools, techniques, and backing tracks.
Guitar Practice Learning Tools
One of the best ways to improve results from your guitar practice is to either play with other musicians or play along to songs you like. When you’re just starting out, this can be a little difficult, since you might not be able to break a song down into manageable parts.
Lucky for you, there are some options out there to help.
Song Surgeon
Song Surgeon works the same as SloMoDirector, but with some different features. You can still slow down MP3s, but there is no feature to watch video — it’s only for audio. Not a big deal though. Most of what you’re trying to learn is in audio form anyway.
I don’t see where I would be messing with the pitch of a tune, but someone must have a use for this functionality.
A very useful and nice-to-have feature is the built-in equalizer. You can isolate different tracks (guitar, vocals, drums…), making it easier to learn a song part during your guitar practice. You are able to save any equalizer presets you create. This functionality worked pretty well.
Normal pricing for Song Surgeon is $70 US, so it’s a little stiffer than SloMoDirector, but the equalizer and ability to rip songs from CD are worth the difference in price. If you don’t have videos you’re trying to learn from, this will be worth your while. You can watch the free demo videos online and see how well it works. Check it out for yourself here.
Modelers
In my guitar practice, it’s easier and more versatile for me to use this than to plug into my amp.
To slow music down, the Toneport works well. Choose full or half speed, which seems to be slow enough to learn most songs.
Standard pricing for GuitarPort is about $8 US per month. This is a separate add-on service to the Toneport device, which runs $90 US list price. This is the low-end “affordable” model. You can spend hundreds of dollars for fuller-featured interfaces or even buy a complete modeling amplifier. Check out what Line 6 offers for your guitar practice and modeling needs.
What’s Your Best Bet?
That said, I’m glad I have both. I like to be able to play and record guitar through the Toneport and have SloMoDirector playing the song I’m learning. It would be nice if SloMoDirector had the equalizer like Song Surgeon, but I’ve lived without it. The Toneport does have an equalizer built in, but this is an effect for your guitar, not the player.