Playback for music practice
Practice a passage from any YouTube video
Tap the tempo, loop two or four bars from the downbeat, slow it down, and get a count-in before every repeat.
Works with YouTube for now. More sources coming soon.
- 1
Paste the lesson, the performance or the play-along
Any YouTube link. Mark the passage you are working on as the Playback.
- 2
Open Practice, pick Music, tap the tempo
Tap along with the beat (the T key works) and Playback reads the BPM. Set beats per bar if it is not in four.
- 3
Park on a downbeat and choose 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars
Playback works out the loop length from the tempo. Add a one bar count-in and the passage comes round again with a cue, every time.
A loop that behaves like practice
Play four bars, stop, one bar of clicks, again. The reset is deliberate. A browser cannot splice a YouTube loop with studio precision, and for learning a hard riff the stop and count-in is the better drill anyway: you get a breath, then a clean entry.
Slow it down, then earn the tempo back
Pick any speed YouTube offers for the video; pitch stays where it was. With Speed up on, each pass returns one notch faster until you are playing at full tempo.
Your turn
Set a gap after each pass and play the phrase back yourself before the recording returns. Set it to the loop's own length for call and response.
Metronome and reference tone, with the video stopped
A metronome at the tempo you tapped and a sustained reference note (with an optional fifth) are there for when you put the recording down and play alone. They only sound while the video is stopped; Playback never plays its own audio over a YouTube video.
Keys worth knowing
- T
- Tap tempo
- [ ]
- Set the loop start or end at the playhead
- P
- Open Practice
- Space
- Play, pause, or skip the count-in
Press ? on any Playback for the full list.
Questions
- Is the count-in locked to the song's beat?
- It leads you back in at the tempo you tapped, and the passage starts when the clicks end. It is not sample-locked to the recording: YouTube's player decides how fast it actually starts, and that varies by a fraction of a second. For practising an entry it works well. It is not a DAW.
- Does slowing down change the pitch?
- No. YouTube's player keeps pitch constant when the speed changes, and Playback uses that player.
- Is it OK to use someone else's YouTube video?
- Playback never downloads, copies or re-hosts a video. The video plays from YouTube's own player, on YouTube's terms, and the creator still gets the view. What Playback saves is a pointer: the video's ID, a start and end time, a speed, and your words. If the owner removes the video from YouTube, it stops playing here too.