Computer Resources

The computer can be a very useful tool in developing your skill as a musician. Below you will find several programs which have helped me.

TablEdit is a great program that you can use to produce both tablature and music notation for songs. If I am learning a song or lick off of a CD, I will transcribe it into this program so that I can print the music for future reference, or provide it to friends and people I play with. There is also a lot of music out on the web writen in TablEdit. You can download the files, play the tunes on your PC and print them (Co-Mando is a great resource for these files). If you won't be creating your own files, there is also a free viewer which allows you to view, play and print TablEdit files.

*********************************

Cool Edit is a Wave file recorder and editor produced by Syntrillium Software. With a microphone and sound card, you can use it to record your own playing onto the computer, and then manipulate the sound. There is both a professional and basic version of the program. Unless you will be doing a lot of multitrack recording, I suggest you start with the basic program - Cool Edit 2000. Both versions can also be used as a learning tool. When trying to learn a tune from a recording, it is often difficult to keep up with the speed of the original recording. With Cool Edit, you can slow down the speed of a tune without altering it's pitch. Some 'artifacts' (extraneous noises) may be introduced into the tune (the greater the change in speed, the greater the artifacts), but rarely enough to make it distracting. I use this feature of the program often to learn tunes from recordings. It is much easier to pick out notes and phrases when you have slowed down a 240 beat per minute bluegrass tune to a more reasonable speed. The tool to use in Cool Edit is "Transform > Time/Pitch > Stretch".

Note: to use this program as suggested, you will need other software to convert tunes on a CD to wave files on your computer. Most software that comes with CD burners, such as "Nero Burning Rom" or "Roxio Easy CD Creator" can be used to do this. There are also lots of free and share ware programs out on the net - check your favoite download site.