Practice Tracks

Practice Makes Perfect!

The most important thing when learning tunes is practice, practice, practice. When playing by yourself it's hard to know when your intonation is off. Slow speed practice and backing tracks can help a lot when learning or perfecting new tunes. Technology helps a lot too, applications for computers and mobile devices such as  the Amazing Slow Downer, Transcribe! etc. let you slow down or speed up mp3 recordings, loop sections of a tune or even transpose a tune to a different key.  Some of our dedicated volunteers have been working on providing play-along tracks for some of our sets to help you learn tunes at home on your own. These tracks are all played at a very slow speed for learning, as you get more familiar with the tune you'll want to use some software to speed things up a bit, or switch to playing along with recordings from a CD. Most of the practice tracks have two versions, one with the melody and one with just the accompaniment backing track (guitar or fiddle). 

Some tracks are piano, others are guitar, and some contain metronome ticks to aid with timing. Many thanks to Gary and Joe for putting these practice tools together for us!