Here’s a big new Soundslice feature that will help you concentrate while you’re learning or practicing. It’s called focus mode, and it’s a way to hide all music except what you’re working on.

It’s simple to use. First, create a loop over the area you want to focus on — either by dragging across the notes (on devices with a mouse) or clicking the loop icon. Then click the “...” icon at the top right of the selection and choose “Focus on this.”

Soundslice will immediately hide all the notation except the bars you’ve selected. What’s more, the associated audio/video will be cropped precisely to the selected bars, no matter whether you’re using audio, video or synthetic playback.

This means you can practice this section of music without being distracted by other parts, and you don’t have to worry about the playhead going outside of the area you care about. Less futzing, more practicing.

There’s some heavy-duty stuff happening here behind the scenes, thanks to our many-year investment in making a state-of-the-art web sheet-music rendering engine. Focus mode treats your focused music as if it’s a standalone piece. This means:

• It’ll start with the appropriate clef, key signature and time signature.
• It’ll be laid out nicely across your screen. (This is especially useful on small screens!)
• Any notations that extend into or out of your focused area will be automatically, and gracefully, dealt with — such as slurs, ties, hairpins and ottava (8va) markings.
• All the parts of our player that automatically react to your notation — from the visual fretboard (which looks at your tab’s maximum fret number to decide its size) to the instrument appearance menu (which looks at the types of notations used in your music in order to provide options on showing/hiding things) — will take focus mode into account.

For more details on focus mode, see our new help page.

Focus mode is now available on any piece of music on Soundslice. It’s absolutely free to use, even if you’re not logged in. It’s also available for all embeds for people in our Licensing plan. Enjoy, and may your practice be ever more efficient!