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If you are a hunt-and-peck kind of musician who likes to poke your way through songs to learn 'em by ear, but have found that your hearing and note recognition is not as sharp as it used to be, you might very well like this extremely well-thought-out and useful program - Guitar & Drum Trainer v.4

I had an old post about a much earlier version of this program but it's been a few years and I had not used it in some time due to a lapse in playing on my part, and just recently got the latest version which has some very nice updates.

What makes it unique is it's ability to alter the playback speed of an MP3 song without altering the pitch of the notes. This is really crucial if you are trying to figure out some really tight, fast passage in a song and want accuracy. You can set multiple loop points to work on different parts of the song, and introduce delay between loops to give yourself time to 'reset' your brain and fingers between loops.

It has other very useful features like setting loop start and stop points, and fine-tuning the pitch of the playback so you can take something that was originally played in a slightly altered tuning and bring it up to standard tuning if that's your preference.

What's new (to me) in this latest version is the equalizer wave display that will show notes at certain peaks if you hover the mouse over them (see pic below). While this is not always totally accurate due to harmonics, backing rythm notes and other stuff going on, it does at least give some crucial insight especially if you are trying to deconstruct chords. In the example below, pretty much everything to the left of where the mouse is hovering is a candidate for being a major, third or fifth note in the chord and it takes only a little experimentation and common sense from that point to dial it in...at least that's how it's worked out so far.

Lastly, the support is excellent - there is a website for the program (author's company is called Renegade Minds) with a forum, but the author himself is bagging the forum and seems to prefer responding directly via email...I answered his purchase questions in an email, struck up a conversation with him, and have asked a few questions about the program which always are answered promptly with screenshots of examples and detailed explanations. You can't beat that kind of attention.

Anyway it's really cool and has been such a great, positive experience that I can't help but recommend it to any fellow amateur (or better) musicians out there.

renegademinds.com/

Sounds good Herr Stoop'

It has other very useful features like setting loop start and stop points, and fine-tuning the pitch of the playback so you can take something that was originally played in a slightly altered tuning and bring it up to standard tuning if that's your preference.