We’re pretty fortunate to live in this day and age of modern technology when it comes to learning the banjo. Thinking back on what I had to work with in the mid 80′s, there was simply tablature…and playing along with records. Yep! Vinyl records. Oh, and cassette tapes. And prior to the 80′s, the scene was even more sparse, with tablature a much harder thing to come by. Fast forward to today, and we have any number of tools to aid our learning efforts. I’ve just stumbled onto one such aid that I highly recommend and want to share with you.
I think it’s important that you take a look at Riffmaster by clicking the blue logo below. This is a digital download, and just like the other product I’ve blogged about, Ultimate Metronome (see the blog post here) this appears to be a pretty indispensable tool for your arsenal.
A must have tool. Click to try it
Can you imagine having J.D. Crowe, Bela Fleck, Jimmy Mills, the Great One (Earl Scruggs) or *fill in name here* sitting there in the room with you, playing a song very slowly, so that you could better imitate what they are doing? Even better, can you imagine having them loop just a small section of the hard part slowly, over and over as many times as you’d like them to? That’s what you get with Riffmaster.
Develop speed, accuracy, and the ability to play by ear
Grab a pre-recorded song that you’d like to learn. You can use MP3, .WMA., .WAV, MP4, Ogg Vorbis, or Aff formats. Open the song using Riffmaster, and then set the whole song to loop over and over, or choose just a small section of the song to loop over and over. Dial the speed back as little or as much as you want…the song stays in key! Adjust the E.Q. and other settings using the digital controls. Then let the learning begin.
You can zoom in to the visual image of the sound wave, isolating the part you want to hear down to the single note of the lick. All of this control will give you an amazing ability to play by ear; it certainly becomes easier to duplicate the notes you are hearing on the music track when you have the control to make the track go as slow as you want and repeat as many times as you want.
- A screen shot of just one of the control panels
You can see just one example of the on-screen controls that the product offers in the image at the right. One of the nice things about this product is that you can have it right now, instantly, through digital download, so there’s no need to wait for shipping or for a store to open.