Software to stretch/slow-down music so you can hear all of the little gracenotes ‘n’ stuff.
Would this be a possible method to help learn techniques and other tunes?
Yes indeed it would.
There are much better things around these days to help the musician learn tunes and subtleties.
Take the old times; when you’d need to come up on a musician from behind, so’s he would not see you as you listened intently to his tune as you tried to learn it and memorise it, at full speed.
Or when I started and was trying to learn tunes, phrase by phrase, lifting the needle off the record (vinyl) and nudging it back a couple of grooves to try to find a missing note.
Fast forward to the late 1970’s, when I bought a four speed Reel-to-Reel tape deck (in a Junk shop), with the idea of playing Ennis and Clancy at half (or quarter) speed , so’s I could hear what they were doing… This was very helpfull indeed. So then I knew what I was listening to and moved on to stage four.
Stage Four; I played cassette recordings of my favourite pipers, ALL DAY LONG, whilst I worked… eventually the penny would drop on a new tune and I’d rush into the house (yes I work at home) and grab my pipes, return to the workshop and play the new tune Verbatim (well, pretty close to verbatim)!
Nowadays you can download a thing that will slow the tune without changing the pitch, or you can then tune-in the recording to play along with it, at any desired pace.
Someone will be along soon to tell you which are today’s most usefull ‘slowdowners’.
Have fun,
Geoff.
Audacity is a comprehensive and free piece of software that will allow you to slow down/change pitch/etc, plus there is a build for the main operating systems.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
The Amazing Slow-downer is a wonderful app. I use it on my iPhone for slowing things down and pitch changing. Marvelous!
I have gotten a sound stretching software called paulstretch, very nice software!
I use Tempo, an Iphone app. It can slow tunes down, change pitch, continuously cycle around a hard part. And you can put together play lists. It can pull tunes off the iphones music library or from the computer, wifi connection, dropbox, or you can record right into it. I have been learning tunes first at the slowest tempo and then i keep increasing tempo till I get to 100%. If i get to a rough spot, i set up a loop, and practice that section till i get it. Its painful but it works.
Thanks, I’ll look for that one…
I use mplayer for this, and this is my one-liner:
mplayer -af scaletempo file_example.wav
I recall hearing or reading that Seamus Ennis and his father would slow down 78s of Patsey Touhy to try work out how he played certain ornamentations. Now that’s Audacity. 
wow totally forgot audacity did that…
just tested, and it’s a great thing…
what a killer (free) application
I’ve been using ASD (Amazing Slow Downer) since it first came out. I reckon I’ve used it over 10,000xs (or MUCH more) at this stage for transcriptions of many different instruments. It’s aces! My vote is for ASD!
Listening to a slowed down verson of Mr. Ennis playing the Bucks of Oranmore! 
Another vote for ASD. I’ve used it on both desktop and iPhone and prefer the iPhone version. Add a Bluetooth head phone and you can play along on the pipes without drowning out the performance you’re learning from.
I also heavily relied on Amazing Slow Downer to learn tunes.
Ideally, you want to be able to learn tunes when they’re played at full speed. That is a pretty useful skill so you need not always rely 100% on the slow down software. Most mortals, of course, can’t do this when they first start learning how to play. I got into the habit of decreasing the speed on ASD as minimally as I could get away with and still hear what was going on with the tune and gradually increasing the speeds at which I learned tunes. I still use the software sometimes, especially if learn a tune off a recording from someone like Frankie Gavin who plays at 110mph.
The caveat is that I don’t feel that I learned much of my ornamentation off ASD. Slow down software isn’t much good at helping you learn it if you are unsupported by real live musicians. Ornamentation can get distorted when you slow the track down too much. Most ornamentation, by its very nature, needs to be fast, i.e. tight triplets or backstitches or even basic cuts and taps, in order to sound right and make any kind of sense (Mr. Spear has told me that he heard an interview with Kevin Burke where he said something along the lines of, “No matter you say it, ‘C-A-T’ will never sound like ‘cat’”). When it gets plugged into the slow down software, it therefore becomes incoherent. The more ornamentation/articulation someone plays with, the more difficult it is for the software to make sense of it. I think someone like Seamus Ennis who has pretty elaborate playing becomes nonsensical when slowed down too much with ASD.
I also think that you really ought to have someone show you the techniques and also, develop the ability to recognise what’s happening in a recording. If you don’t know what a backstitch or ghost D or whatever sounds like and how to play one, you’ll struggle to pick it up from a recording, slow downer or no.
I’ve been using an Olympus digital stereo dictaphone for years to learn tunes .
It can slow down a tune to half speed while keeping the pitch or speed it up to twice the speed and it lets you repeat phrases over and over.
Its also very handy in a session for recording ‘that tune you’ve always meant to learn’. With its built in USB connector its a doddle to upload recordings to your PC.
Takes up no space in my case, weighs next to nothing and is a fraction of the cost of an iphone
Takes up no space in my case, weighs next to nothing and is a fraction of the cost of an iphone
My iPhone/smartphone truly takes up no space in my case since it is in my pocket! Good job too since my whistle cases have no room for even a dictaphone that “takes up no space”
A smartphone (more true of some models than others) also weighs next to nothing - in fact since I would be carrying it anyway you could say it weighs nothing!
And since I already have the phone for other reasons the dictaphone is more expensive.
Of course if you don’t have a smartphone then the Olympus dictaphone is a great solution (does ‘slow downer’ type of software exist for Android or Windows Phone or whatever OS you might have ? ).
By having smartphone I only have to carry one small object and I have a GPS, a camera, a tuner/metronome, a recording device, a flashlight, an alarm clock/timer, a collection of tunes to jog my memory or look up new ones, email, texting, the ability to ftp and edit files on web servers, check the weather, a reminder/to do list, my address book, the internet, a yellow pages, and the list goes on … adding more functions in the form of software is very inexpensive often free.
- Horses for courses -