Here’s what’s new on Soundslice:

The notebook

Every piece of music in your library now has an attached “notebook” — a place for your own personal notes on the music. Click “Notebook” at upper right of any slice to open it:

For now, the notebook has three sections: a practice log, clips and private notes. These aren’t new features per se, but previously they were only available within the context of a list. Now these features are much quicker and easier to access.

We’re keen to add more types of personal notes and annotations to the notebook. Let us know if you have any ideas on what would help your own music practice.

Practice logging for free

One feature of the notebook — practice logging — is now available for all Soundslice users, even on the Free plan. Previously this feature was only available for paying customers.

Slices open in View mode by default

In your slice manager, clicking a slice’s title used to open it in Edit mode. Now, it opens in View mode.

We made this change based on an educated hunch that many people are using edit mode for practice (which we wouldn’t recommend, because the edit features might get in your way) and that some people don’t even realize View mode exists.

You can still edit a slice by clicking “Edit” (when in View mode), or via the new “Edit” button to the right of each slice’s title in the slice manager:

And if you primarily use Soundslice to edit, have no fear — we’ve added a way to set a preference for whether slices open in View vs. Edit mode. Click this button in the slice manager and look for “Slices open in”:

This preference will be saved in your account.

Pedal steel guitar tablature support

We’ve added support for pedal steel guitar, a truly crazy and cool instrument.

Specifically, you can now create a pedal steel guitar instrument in our editor, and you can specify the active pedal(s) for any note. With the proper pedal information applied, our system will be able to do the following:

• Display the correct pitch in standard notation
• Display the pedal name (“A”, “B”, etc.) in the tab
• Use the correct pitch in synthetic playback

It’s currently limited to the Emmons copedent, probably the most common setup for pedal steel. We’ll expand it over time. See our new help page for more info.

Bends in standard notation

For years — years! — our standard notation didn’t display any bend information. Finally, it will now communicate bends (in most cases):

You’ll need to take care in how you create the bend, in order for the standard notation to include the bend info. The key is to tie multiple notes together, and input the bend on the first note. Then our system will automatically draw an angle bracket connecting the notes, and the second note will use the bent pitch.

For bend types such as “Bend and release,” our standard notation doesn’t yet communicate the bend. These are a complex case, in which a single note has multiple pitches, so we still need to find a good solution there.

Adding students to courses more quickly

For those of you in our Teacher plan, we’ve made it easier to manage your students’ courses. In the “Students” section, you can now access a page that displays all the courses that student is in, with a way to add the student to multiple courses in a single action.

New plans page

We’ve beefed up our plans page to include a very detailed table comparing features across the plans.