This is not your fathers slow down software. As the folks put it a Capo “Capo is a revolutionary tool that helps you learn the music in your iTunes library. By slowing your music, and presenting a detailed spectrogram, Capo lets you hear and see your music like never before”. That indeed is an understatement!
Capo Slowdown Software Program:
When first learning the guitar nearly everyone longs to play the guitar like their favorite musician and it makes no difference what genre we are talking about here. Whether it is Merle Travis, Jerry Reed, Eric Clapton, Slash, or Tony Rice, trying to replicate one of their licks can be maddening. I have experienced that many times, starting with my first Chet Atkins record – Yes that’s right I said record.
Later as I progressed to reel to reel tapes, they afforded a lot more accuracy when slowing down the song, but also changed the song one octave lower and made it difficult to discern. Next came the computer age and there was a little program called TransKriber that I bought. This was great. I could take a song, make it an aiff format and load it into transkriber and slow it down to any speed that I wanted. But, it was cumbersome and a little buggy.
Capo Slowdown Software:
But now, we have the equivalent of a Lamborghini of slow down software and that software program is called Capo. If you own a Mac or an iPhone, you are in luck. If not, I would go out and buy one.:-) This software is that good, period, and takes full advantage of the sound production qualities of the Mac OSX operating system.
Just for the fun of it I loaded Jerusalem Ridge, a song that is played by Tony Rice from his Tony Rice Unit album. All I did was drag it from iTunes and dropped onto the Capo program and Capo did the rest in about 2 seconds.
There was always that final break that Tony did and I could never get just right, so I dragged the slider over to the break, clicked on the 1/4 speed icon and I could not believe my ears. It sounded exactly like Tony playing it 25% as fast and as clear as a bell.
I could play almost anything with this! What this means to you, is you can take a song that is played at 220bbm and play it at 110bbm or even 55bpm. This gives you incredible access to some of these difficult breaks you will find in any song.
Creating Loops:
Also you can just scrub an area you want to concentrate on and just hit the loop icon that pops up. Now the difficult passage will play over and over until you ‘get it’. Also, any areas can be marked in different ways. There are markers for chorus, verse, bridge or just a generic marker. You keep the markers with the song and you can come back to them anytime. To drop a marker just click the c, v, b or m keys respectively. It’s that easy.
You can also loop by double clicking between two markers that you have set. That is what I use and it is really fast. I just spend a bit of time right after loading the song and set all my markers of areas I want to work on and I can come back at anytime to create these loops.
Filter Out Unwanted Voices With The Equalizer:
Want to focus on a particular instrument, like a guitar during or in combination with a vocal? Just click on the equalizer button to filter out the voice and the instrument will come through loud and clear.
Pitch is variable too. Just click on the pitch button and you can easily change keys too. Wow that is amazing! This even means if you want to learn the song in a different key or use a capo, simply click on the pitch control and adjust the key to transpose the song and you don’t have to do anything else.
Check Out The Video Below:
Exporting Music From Capo:
Capo lets you export pitch- and speed-corrected audio for use in your iPod, so you can practice your favorite music while you’re away from your computer.
To export the whole song from Capo
Choose File > Export Song…
You can also export only the looped portion of a song, and load that onto your iPod for seamless looping.
To export the currently set loop from Capo
Choose File > Export Loop…
Capo exports files using the MPEG-4 AAC audio codec by default, and can optionally export uncompressed AIFF files for higher quality output. You can choose the format from the pop-up button that’s displayed when you’re prompted to save the exported audio.
Capo for iPhone:
Don’t have a Mac? Don’t fret for the program is available as an iPhone app for only $19.95 and has most of the functionality as the full-blown Mac version. In fact, I think I may gravitate more toward this version than the desktop one. I like being able to have access to the program when on the road or in a remote location. You can load whatever songs you want to work on into iTunes on your iPod side of the iPhone, and the program works flawlessly.
Interested in ordering this program right now? Just click this link and you will be taken to the Capo site and you can either download a trial that will work just a few minutes, but gives you the feel of the programs abilities, or you can order it for $49 bucks. For the iPhone version just go to the app store under the search Capo.
