M
y old guitar teacher used
to tell me horror stories of
having to learn guitar solos
in the days of vinyl. For
those of you who are vinyl collectors
and enthusiasts, I’m sure you cringe
at the thought of constantly moving
the needle back and forth across
the record, changing the speed and
messing up the calibration to get
the record to play slower. While we
have come far from our days spent
scratching up records (not in the good
way), learning guitar solos can still be
quite a feat. Even with the advent of
the YouTube cover, and the various
programs available that slow down
music to a learnable pace, mastering or
even studying a solo is still a task that
requires patience, a keen ear, and a
slow hand (no pun intended). The age
old art of pausing, skipping around and
slowing down a track to learn a guitar
solo is still the the ruling class here,
but the folks at Slowhand are trying
to streamline the process, and make a
once tedious and painfully repetitive
feat just a little bit easier to bare.
Slowhand is the name of a new
guitar learning software, currently in
production by Mastermind Design.
While that may sound like a marketing
firm full of out-of-touch old men trying
to cash in on the guitar game, the
exact opposite is true. The captain at
the helm of this ship, Bob DeKett, is a
bona fide gear nut and a serious guitar
player. Bob and his team set out to
fill a hole in the market by providing
something that most guitar learning
software hasn’t touched: integrated
control. With the help of the Slowhand
foot controller, learning complex solos
and difficult passages is both intuitive
and efficient, providing a level of
control that never requires players to
take their hands off the guitar. Within
two uninterrupted hours of firing
up Slowhand, I was able to master
the first solo to Steely Dan’s “Kid
Charlemagne,” which, as I’m sure
many know, is a complex and
challenging solo to master. With the
help of the foot controller, I was able
to slow the tempo, zoom in to specific
parts of the video, and create loops
of different sections of the solo,
splitting a daunting task into more
manageable pieces.
Before I spoke to Bob about his
product, I took his foot controller
and software for a test run. I’m no
stranger to the tedium of the old
“pause, rewind, repeat” technique,
and anything to help me learn solos
more accurately and intuitively is
heartily welcome in my book. Initially,
there were a few hiccups getting video
to play, but Bob and his team were
right there to help me figure it out
(Apparently, the “K-Lite Codec Pack”
is needed for this software to run
properly, which one should download
before they install the software). After
WORDS BY YOEL KREISLER
ToneReport.com
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