Lesson 2 – Figuring out your favorite song

The Native American Flute Portal - Flute School Blog

This weeks lesson is about discovering a great tool that you can use to help figure out the notes in that favorite flute song, or even determine what key flute was used to play the recording. (Maybe you can even use it to discover the “Forbidden Note” from Cliff’s post)

I discovered a cool software tool called: “Transcribe!” that will slow down (or speed up) an MP3 or WAV file by 15% to 150% while still keeping the correct pitch in the playback. This is an awesome way to help train your ear for finding the right note.

Here’s a screenshot of the software:

Notice that you have some real simple choices to slow down the playback. Note also that when you select a region of the song/phrase, it shows what pitch the note is, on the virtual keyboard below. In the example above the highlighted note is an F above middle C. You can also use Transcribe! as a simple recording interface and then play back your piece while you relearn what you just played (or notate it…).

Transcribe! is not free, but you can download and try it for 30 days. Cost is $50, for MAC, PC and Linux.

Link: http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/download.html

They also have a free, online metronome: http://www.seventhstring.com/metronome/metronome.html

And an online digital tuner: http://www.seventhstring.com/tuner/tuner.html