How to loop and slow a guitar lesson to practise it

The lesson is twelve minutes. The part you cannot play is eight seconds of it. Practising means finding those eight seconds again, and again, and again.

18 September 2026

This is a real displaced habit rather than an invented use case. When YouTube retired Clips in April 2026, one of the complaints in its own announcement thread came from someone who had used Clips to isolate short sections of songs in order to learn to play them. That workflow stopped working, and nothing native replaced it.

Setting up a practice loop

1. 1Open Loop and paste the lesson.
2. 2Play up to the bar you are stuck on and press Start loop. Let it run to the end of the phrase and press End loop.
3. 3Nudge the edges with Shift and the arrow keys, a tenth of a second at a time, until the loop lands where the phrase does rather than halfway through a note.
4. 4Press S, or use the square brackets, until it is the fastest speed you can still play cleanly. Often that is not a round number.
5. 5Add a note to yourself with N, then copy the link and keep it.

Why keeping the link matters more than it sounds

The expensive part of practising from a video is not the playing. It is finding the passage, setting the speed and getting the loop points right, every single session. A link that holds all of that means tomorrow starts at the loop instead of at the search bar.

The same link works for a teacher setting an exercise, and for you sending back what you cannot get. If you want two versions side by side, the lesson and your own recording, that is Compare.

Two honest limits

Slowing the audio down lowers its pitch, which is how the browser does it, so this is for working out what the hands are doing rather than for ear training. And loop points land on the nearest keyframe, so a start can sit a fraction of a second off. For a phrase that is fine; if you need the loop to be beat-locked, it is not.

More on the practice side of this on the music practice page.