Capo
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Capo for Mac gets a feature update, makes learning music even easier
A couple years ago I took an in-depth look at Capo, the music-learning app designed to reverse engineer music on your Mac, making music easier to hear, and therefore easier to learn to play. Capo has seen a major update since then to 3.0, bringing some big new features and enhancing the best of the previous version. Better still, it's cheaper, too, at US$29.99 on the Mac App Store. Since I covered most of what Capo has to offer in my previous review (which you can read here), I'm going to jump straight into Capo's new and enhanced features. Capo has enhanced its spectrogram feature (analyzing the audio in a track) to automatically detect chords that are played in a song. Furthermore, the chords are placed in chord boxes that show you how to play the them, with easy-to-read chord descriptions, and where the changes are in the song. You can also try different variations of chords from the box, just double-click a chord box to see a variety of different inversions. Chord detection isn't flawless. I noticed that more subtle chords were often not detected, and chords were sometimes not placed coherently in the song. For example, at the start of a bar. This is all down to the spectrogram's analysis of the music. The detection accuracy will vary from song to song as some songs will be easier for the software to analyze than others. However, Capo is all about giving you a starting point to learn a song. The point is not to simply show you what to play, but to encourage you to actively listen to what is being played. And it does that very well. Chords can easily be added, where the software has missed them, as well as moved around to a more accurate position. If you can't figure out a chord that Capo has missed, you can select that area of the song and ask Capo to specifically detect it. Results will vary, but it's certainly worth a go. Beat detection automatically detects the time signature and beats-per-minute of a song, and there's a metronome that can be turned on and off, with options for emphasis on the down beat, too. It works really well, though if there's an ethereal-sounding guitar drone at the start (or something similar), before the actual drums kick in, this can throw the metronome's click placement. Capo also has a tab feature, where you can highlight areas of the spectrogram and Capo will transpose those areas into guitar tab. It's a clever idea, but requires a fair amount of work to do. And once more, your mileage will vary on the analysis of the audio through Capo's spectrogram. One of the great features of Capo is its region looping. In version 3, multiple regions can now be named and snapped to the beat. Looping a region in time and with the click is easier than ever, making practicing a specific part of a song over and over really easy. Of course, Capo's still got its ability to slow down or speed up a song without the pitch being affected, but you can also change the pitch if you desire. Really, Capo's mission is to give you as much listening control as possible over a song, enabling you to hear the music, so that you can develop and enhance your own listening skills to become a better musician. If you're a beginner or intermediate musician, a music teacher or just someone that wants to learn to play the guitar, Capo is a good-looking, easy-to-use app that will give you a solid platform in learning to listen to and play music. I still feel Capo hasn't quite found the sweet spot for its pricing, but at $20 cheaper than the previous version, Capo is priced better than ever as a tool to invest in to enhance your musical abilities.
A closer look at Capo, the app that helps musicians learn music
The tag line that follows Capo reads, "reverse engineering rock and roll." And that's exactly what Capo does. Capo is an app (Mac OS X or iOS) specifically designed to help musicians learn how to play music in an environment that makes it easier to hear what's going on in the music -- by reverse engineering it. Say you're trying to learn to play a particular song, but you're struggling to identify the exact chord progression in that song because it moves too quickly. Or, in another song, there's a crazy guitar riff you'd like to play, but you can't make heads or tails of it because it's insanely fast. How do you figure out exactly what's going on in that song so that you can learn to play it yourself? Well, you could go out and buy the sheet music or tab, but that's not always practical or convenient, nor is it always desirable. As a musician, developing your hearing skills is one of the best ways to improve your overall musicianship. Capo makes it a little easier to do that, especially if you're a beginner or intermediate. How does Capo do this? Through a number of clever and nifty features, but most notably by giving you a larger amount of control over how you hear music.
Capo 2 detects chords and tabs in your favorite songs
We reported on the original version of Capo a while back, and now the folks at SuperMegaUltraGroovy have released version 2 over on their website. The biggest feature in the new release is "a highly detailed spectrogram visualization," which basically means that they've implemented what the first app couldn't do; there's actual chord detection in the software. As you play the song, you can see visualizations of where the notes fall on the scale, and you can lay down chord markers that will automatically mark out your chords. Basically, you can reverse engineer the song. It's pretty wild. You'll still need some musical insight since the app doesn't always get it perfectly right, and you'll need to know where the chord changes are in order to mark them out. It's impressive, though. I was able to get a basic chord structure out of the first verse of the Decemberists song above, and if I played around with it some more, I bet that I could reproduce the song on the guitar. You can also have it write out tabs for you, and all of the features of the first version are back; you can mark out choruses and verses on all of your songs, correct pitch and speed, and set up loops to play along with. If you do any amount of playing around with your favorite songs, it's a fun tool to have. Capo 2 is US $49 as a new purchase or US $19 as an upgrade from the first version. It's also available as a free five minute trial download from the site.
Capo gives you play-along tempo controls for $39
Capo is a new app from the makers of TapeDeck, and it's the talk of the town amongst musicians -- it allows you to simply change the speed or pitch of any songs you happen to have laying around your computer, so that you can play or sing along with them at your own pace. We got a chance to try out the app just before release (though it's available for $39 right now), and while the UI is very impressive, the actual purpose of the app is too limited, in my opinion, to be worth it.Not that it does anything badly -- the speed and pitch manipulation are very impressive. While there's a little bit of clipping and distortion at the absolute extremes, that's to be expected when you're changing these attributes on the fly, and when you're not at the extremes, things sound really great here. The app is extremely responsive to the controls as well, which are very intuitive and well designed -- you can choose to quickly select various tempos or pitches on a meter, or drag the slider in between those to find exactly the point you want. And no matter how fast you move the slider, the music responds instantly without any noise or slowdown. If you want to change a song's pitch or speed in order to try to play along with it or give it a closer listen, Capo will let you do exactly that, in style.
