Speed training

With our speed training feature, you can tell our player to increase the playback speed by a certain amount each time through a loop.

For example, you can specify “Play this loop starting at 50% speed and ending at 100% speed. Increase the speed by 5% after every two loop cycles.” If you’re using synthetic playback, it uses BPMs instead of percentages.

This is a great practice tool, helping you ease gently from comfortable speeds to more challenging ones. And it works with any music in our system, whether real audio, video or synthetic playback.

Activating speed training

To begin speed training, view any piece of music in Soundslice and click the speed interface at the bottom of the screen, then choose “Speed training…” It looks like this:

You’ll see a menu that lets you set the speed training parameters:

These parameters are:

• Initial speed — the initial playback speed we’ll use when you press Play.
• Final speed — the final playback speed.
• Increase speed by — how much we should increment the speed each time it increases.
• Each speed plays — how many times the loop will be played for each individual speed.
• Play a count-in before each loop — whether to enable our metronome count-in each time through the loop.

If synthetic playback is currently active, these values will be BPMs (beats per minute). Otherwise, they’ll be percentages, where 100% means the original speed of the recording.

After you’ve entered your parameters, just press Play to start the speed training. While speed training is active, we’ll add a little arrow to the speed controls, so that you know it’s active:

Example

Here is a small example, to help you understand exactly what happens for given parameters:

• Initial speed: 50%
• Final speed: 100%
• Increase speed by: 10%
• Each speed plays: 4 times

With these settings, playback starts at 50% speed and ends at 100% speed. Each speed is played four times, then speed increments by 10%.

The loop will be played a total of 24 times: 50%, 50%, 50%, 50%, 60%, 60%, 60%, 60%, 70%, etc. It will end with four times at 100% speed.

Using speed training without a loop

Speed training is mostly intended to be used with a loop. But that’s not strictly necessary!

If you don’t have an active loop, you can still use speed training; we’ll merely treat the entire slice as one big loop. (Tip: You might also enjoy focus mode, which lets you crop the visible music on your screen.)

Pausing and canceling speed training

If you pause playback during speed training, we’ll keep your place within the training session. That is, if you’ve already done 10 repetitions, you’ll pick up right at repetition 11 rather than starting from scratch.

To cancel speed training: use the speed controls to set the speed manually — e.g., set it to 100% speed. (This will work even if you manually select the speed that your speed training is currently set at.)

To reset speed training: pause playback, then use the speed controls to open the speed training screen again.

Using count-ins

Speed training works seamlessly with our metronome count-in feature. Just check the checkbox next to “Play a count-in before each loop” when setting up your speed training.

This count-in will use the tempo of the upcoming iteration, to prepare you for the tempo change.

Is it possible to make the speed increment downward, i.e. getting slower?

Not at this time. If you’re interested in this, let us know!

Is it possible to save my commonly used speed training parameters?

Not at this time. If you’re interested in this, let us know how you’d like to use it — would you want global saved settings, or per-slice saved settings? Or both?