Practising a song at home with an A/B loop
There is a bar in the song you cannot play. You know exactly which one. You have played the whole song eleven times this week and got it wrong in the same place eleven times, and each attempt cost you three and a half minutes.
That is forty minutes spent to practise a passage for about twenty seconds.
Looping fixes the arithmetic. Set a loop over the four bars, and forty minutes buys you two hundred repetitions of the thing you cannot do instead of eleven passes at the things you already can. The technique is old, every serious practice routine uses it, and the reason more people do not is that setting up a loop used to be a hassle.
Set the loop tight, then make it looser
The first instinct is to loop the bar that goes wrong. It is usually the wrong loop.
Most failures do not happen where they sound like they happen. If you fluff the first note of bar 33, the problem is often the position change at the end of bar 32, or the breath you did not take. Loop only bar 33 and you will practise recovering from a bad approach, two hundred times, and get very good at recovering.
A loop that works starts one bar before the trouble and ends one bar after it. It includes the approach, the thing, and the exit. It is long enough to be musical and short enough that a repetition costs seconds.
Once the passage is reliable, extend the loop outwards. Two bars before, two after. Then the whole phrase. Then the section. What you are training is not the notes, it is the transition into and out of them, and each extension is a new transition.
Slow it down, and be honest about how much
Tempo reduction is the other half. The rule that gets repeated is to slow down until you can play it perfectly, and it is right, but people cheat on the definition of perfectly.
Perfectly means: correct notes, correct rhythm, no tension in the hand, and you are not concentrating hard. If you are concentrating hard, you are still too fast. That is uncomfortable advice because the tempo where it is genuinely easy is often embarrassingly slow, and the temptation is to sit at 80 percent where it mostly works.
Eighty percent is the worst place to practise. It is fast enough that you make errors and slow enough that you do not notice you are making them, so you rehearse a slightly wrong version until it is permanent.
A workable ladder:
- Find the tempo where it is genuinely easy. Ignore how slow that is.
- Ten clean repetitions.
- Go up by about five percent.
- Not clean? Drop back down and do ten more.
The whole ladder takes twenty minutes and moves faster than an hour of trying at full speed. What you cannot do is skip the first step.
There is a technical requirement hiding in there: changing the tempo must not change the pitch. Slowing down an audio file the naive way drops the key, so you practise against a backing that is flat and your ear learns the wrong intervals. Any tool worth using does time stretching that leaves the pitch alone.
Change the key when the song is in the wrong one
The third tool gets used less and solves a specific set of problems.
The singer needs it lower. The recording is in B and it sits badly in the voice. Practising in B and then playing it in A means the muscle memory and the ear are trained on a different thing.
You are learning by ear from a recording that is not at concert pitch. Older records are sometimes slightly sharp or flat. Half an hour of trying to find a chord that exists between two frets is time gone.
Transposing instruments. An alto sax player working from a recording is doing the transposition in their head while also learning the part.
Shifting by semitones is a small feature that removes an entire category of friction, and again it has to be done without wrecking the timing.
Mark the spots so you can come back tomorrow
The part that is easy to skip and pays off most: when you find the passage, mark it.
Practice happens over weeks. If every session starts with two minutes of scrubbing to find the bit you were working on, you will do that maybe four times before you stop bothering. If the spot is bookmarked, you open the take and you are there.
Bookmarks earn more when they are sorted by what they mean. In Band Companion they come in categories: mistakes to fix, good moments, arrangement notes. Those are three genuinely different things:
- Mistakes to fix is your practice list. Open the song, see four marks, work through them.
- Good moments is what you want to keep. The take where the ending landed. Useful when the band is deciding which version to settle on.
- Arrangement notes is for the band rather than for you. "We cut the second solo here." "Bass comes in a bar early." Attached to the second, not to a memory of a Tuesday.
Practise against your own band, not the record
Here is the thing that changes practice more than any of the tools above.
Most people practise against the original recording. It is the obvious choice and it is often the wrong one, because your band does not play the song the way the record does. The intro is shorter. There is no string section. The second verse is a semitone up because that is where it sits for your singer. The solo is eight bars, not sixteen.
Practise against the record for four weeks and then rehearse, and you will play the record's version confidently while everyone else plays yours.
Practising against your band's own rehearsal take fixes that, and it is the practical reason to record rehearsals in the first place. Covered in how to record band rehearsals on your phone: a take filed against the song, dated, with the tempo detected, and one marked as the version you agreed on. That marked take is what you loop.
The take is worse than the record. Someone coughs, the drums are loud, the room is a room. It is also the actual arrangement, which makes it worth more for this purpose than a perfect recording of a different version.
A routine that fits in twenty minutes
For one difficult passage, on a weeknight:
- Open the take the band settled on. Go to the bookmark.
- Set the loop one bar before and one bar after.
- Drop the tempo until it is easy. Actually easy.
- Ten clean repetitions. Up five percent. Repeat.
- When it holds at full tempo, widen the loop to the whole phrase and run it three times.
- Move the bookmark to whatever is now the weakest point, or delete it if there is not one.
Step six is what makes the next session start where this one ended, and it is the one everybody skips.
When the passages are solid and the question becomes what order you play the songs in, that is the setlist and the gig calendar.
Frequently asked questions
What is an A/B loop?
Two markers, A and B, defining a section of audio that repeats continuously. You set A just before a passage and B just after it, and the player runs that section over and over so you can practise it without playing the whole song each time.
Does slowing down a song change its pitch?
It depends on the tool. Naive slowing down lowers the pitch, which trains your ear on the wrong intervals. Proper time stretching separates tempo from pitch, so you can slow a song down by a third and it stays in the same key. Band Companion changes tempo and pitch independently for this reason.
How slow should I practise a difficult passage?
Slow enough that it is easy without concentrating. That is usually slower than feels reasonable. Practising at the speed where you make small errors is worse than useless, because you are rehearsing the errors along with the notes.
Should I practise with the original recording or with my band's version?
Your band's version, once you have one. Bands change arrangements, keys and lengths, and practising against the record means learning a version nobody at rehearsal is playing. The original is the better reference for tone and feel, and a poor reference for what actually happens on the night.
Can I change the key of a recording to match my singer?
Yes, by shifting in semitones, which is standard in any player built for practice. It is worth doing rather than transposing in your head, because the point of practice is that the part becomes automatic, and doing arithmetic while you play prevents exactly that.