MOTUnation.com

After half a century of learning guitar and bass parts by listening to the music, I came across Capo 3. The trial doesn't accomplish much that you can't do with much fussing with filters, panning, stretch etc, and it feels like cheating, but this sure is quick and convenient. It's not that good at chord detection, but does a reasonable job of tempo and time.

It's pretty cheap, especially the iOS version, so I guess these applications have been around for a while, and I've not noticed. Any opinions on this? Are there other and better applications for this purpose?

http://supermegaultragroovy.com/products/capo/mac/

If it even half works as advertised, I can see that it would save a lot of time were I still teaching guitar or preparing instructional materials. Yea, I'd plop down the $10.

As I do neither anymore, I'll save the ten bills but I do see the possibilities.

mikehalloran wrote:If it even half works as advertised, I can see that it would save a lot of time were I still teaching guitar or preparing instructional materials. Yea, I'd plop down the $10.

As I do neither anymore, I'll save the ten bills but I do see the possibilities.

I haven't tried the iOS version and don't know if it does the same things as the $30 Mac version. There's a free trial.

I personally like Transcribe...

http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/screenshots.html

dewdman42 wrote:I personally like Transcribe...

http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/screenshots.html

Thanks, I'll look at it if it can generate a decent tempo track. Chord detection would be handy for printing out parts, but it's the tempo track I really want. Capo seemed to work well on the first couple of pieces I tried it on, but it was pretty useless on a few others.

I don't think Transcribe outputs a tempo track, if you need that. The best it can do in that regard is you can manually enter markers for beats and measures by hitting certain keys as the song plays. Not very precise, but kind of close enough for transcription purposes. Then when you select a range of markers it will compute the tempo and tell you what it is. It does not figure out the beats from the music nor the tempo nor output any kind of tempo track.

What I like about Transcribe is that it has a lot of useful EQ and other tools to isolate whatever it is you're trying to transcribe. It tries to take a guess at the polyphonic notes it thinks it detects in the music, which is sometimes helpful. It tries to take a guess at the chord, not always exactly right. I can slow it way way down and tweak the pitch of the recording so its in tune. Also you can save a project file with markers and annotation text notes, which is helpful. I do find it helpful to at least make markers for song sections and sometimes bars too. You can easily select a range and listen to it over and over very slowly and with the various EQ and phase cancelation tools isolate the particular part you are trying to transcribe.

In any case, it may not be what you're looking for if you're looking to automatically grab chords and tempo track out of the music as I don't think its particularly accurate for chord detection and does not automatically figure out tempo really unless you tap in the beats and even then it doesn't output an actual tempo track from start to finish.

dewdman42 wrote:In any case, it may not be what you're looking for if you're looking to automatically grab chords and tempo track out of the music as I don't think its particularly accurate for chord detection and does not automatically figure out tempo really unless you tap in the beats and even then it doesn't output an actual tempo track from start to finish.

No, doesn't sound like this is what I want. I can usually "hear" the chords well enough. But having automatic chord detection would be convenient when I have to make a simple lead sheet so I don't have to type all the chords in. Logic used to do that, but not very well, and it was dropped. Odd, because it will still display the chord in the transport on playback, it just won't use that information in its score editor.

For tempo tracks I usually tap out the bests as you suggest, and then let DP figure out the tempo, but even that doesn't work very consistently and takes a long time to get right. I was hoping the new tempo detection in Melodyne might be exportable, but it seems not.