Not too long after its launch in 2005, you'd be hard-pushed to visit any friends without being challenged to a round or two of Guitar Hero. Interest in learning to play a real guitar also blossomed, but many found the transition from guitar-shaped controller to actual instrument a difficult one, and perfectly good axes have been gathering dust ever since. Irish company Sonic Ladder has now released some interesting software called Riffstation that gives you the opportunity to break out your much-neglected guitar and play along with your favorite bands to onscreen prompts. Gizmag takes a look at what this software has to offer.
Riffstation is divided into three parts. The Chord Viewer auto-detects a song's chords and displays them in real time under a scrolling audio waveform graphic, while simultaneously providing diagrams to show you where on your guitar neck your fingers need to be placed, and when. Jam Master allows you to slow down the music so you can practice your newly-learned solo at more manageable speeds. It can also isolate and remove guitar parts from a song, so you can take the lead, and gives you control over the pitch, to allow you to jam in a key that you're familiar and comfortable with. With Riff Builder, you can grab sections of a song and create your own custom backing tracks to play along to.
Riffstation is divided into three parts. The Chord Viewer auto-detects a song's chords and displays them in real time under a scrolling audio waveform graphic, while simultaneously providing diagrams to show you where on your guitar neck your fingers need to be placed, and when. Jam Master allows you to slow down the music so you can practice your newly-learned solo at more manageable speeds. It can also isolate and remove guitar parts from a song, so you can take the lead, and gives you control over the pitch, to allow you to jam in a key that you're familiar and comfortable with. With Riff Builder, you can grab sections of a song and create your own custom backing tracks to play along to.
First under the microscope is Chord Viewer, which is activated by clicking the appropriately-marked third tab in the middle section of the user interface. When you load in an MP3 source track, a waveform graphic appears in the top section. There'll be a brief message underneath stating that the chords are being calculated, and then a fairly cramped set of chord blocks will appear. You can zoom in for a more detailed look at the chord structure by hovering your mouse over either part of this section, then use the scroll wheel to move in or out as desired, or by clicking the plus or minus symbols above the word "Zoom" on the left.
There's a button marked "Scroll" on the right which needs to be clicked if you want the chord prompt graphics to follow the song. This is turned off by default, but it's quite disconcerting for the chord strip to remain static as the song moves on, so you'll likely want this to be active. There's an overall track timeline below the chord strip that allows you to keep an eye on exactly where you are in the big scheme of things, or to choose precisely where you want the song to start from. Annoyingly, the scroll feature seems to disable itself after clicking anywhere on the timeline, so you'll need to remember to activate it again.
The Chord Viewer tool sits in a box underneath. All of the chords detected are shown on the left so you can familiarize yourself with the shapes before attempting to play along. A large graphic of the current chord shape and its name underneath is displayed in the center section. The next chord to be played is displayed next door, along with a countdown timer. Move right again and you will see a column of controls.
The uppermost control is the Key Shift. While you might think it strange to want to change the key of the song you're trying to play, it can be useful when the software detects sharps or flats, or the chords offered are just plain awkward. Under the Key Shift is a Tempo control. Though you're unlikely to want to speed the song up, you might want to slow things down to a more comfortable learning pace.
Moving down again brings you to the Chord Type buttons. Acoustic players might prefer to opt for open chords, while electric git-fiddlers will likely want power chords to be shown. The last control is used to switch between four different neck types for displaying your chord patterns. The default is no neck type, then there's what looks like rosewood, followed by lacquered maple, and natural maple.
The box on the right is home to a Chord Finder. Selecting the chord name from the two boxes at the top results in the appropriate chord shape graphic appearing below (though this does appear to be limited to open chords only). A useful extension would be to allow users access to the neck diagram, to click on the strings where fingers need to be placed and be presented with the appropriate chord name.
The bottom part of Riffstation is given over to playback control, with a metronome dial on the left to increase or decrease the presence of a timing click in the mix, and an overall volume knob on the right. In addition to play/pause/stop and forward/back buttons positioned inbetween, there's also a looper. You can highlight sections of the song in the top window (in much the same way as you would highlight text in a document), and clicking on the looper repeats that section over and over again until you've nailed it.
So that's the theory out of the way, but how did the Chord Viewer perform in tests? For my first track I selected Let's Lynch The Landlord by the Dead Kennedys. The software took just a few short seconds to pick out the chords for this power punk classic, but the algorithm didn't always present them correctly.
While the detection algorithm seemed to get off to a good start, there were a few minor errors dotted here and there and numerous places in the track where it seemed to just give up altogether. Instead of correctly showing a number of chords across several beats, for example, only one long single chord was shown.
Also, at the end of each chord run, there's a little four-note flurry before the rhythm repeats. Unfortunately, as the minimum interval is one beat, there's no way to accurately reproduce the four notes across two beats. However, you can just about get away with selecting the first and last chord in this sequence by manually entering those chords into the strip. This is achieved by right-clicking on the errant chord name at the appropriate point in the orange chord strip and then placing the dot in the correct place in the grid.
The company's Mikel Gainza says that future revisions of the software will allow players to dig a little deeper into notes per beat.
"Chord Viewer makes certain assumptions about the songs it's analyzing," he reveals. "For example, it assumes there is only one chord per beat, which explains why you cannot throw four chords over two beats. This assumption will be relaxed in the next version of Riffstation, but it was found to be the best compromise to increase detection accuracy in as many popular songs as possible. In other words, there are plenty of internal algorithmic settings that could be tweaked to improve the accuracy for a given genre/style. However, we chose to use the settings that would work best with basic chord progressions in popular music, limited to one chord per beat and major/minor/seventh chords."
Despite the relative simplicity of this brief track, I had to make a good many corrections before the chord strip displayed something I could effectively play along to without having to apologize to any avid DK fans who might be within earshot. Interestingly, though I didn't save the corrections or the file upon exiting, the next time I loaded the song into Riffstation, all of my alterations were present.
Errors in the detected chords of my next few selections (including BB King's The Thrill is Gone, Neighbor, Neighbor by ZZ Top and Beth Hart's The Ugliest House on the Block) led to even more corrections, before I had something I could convincingly play along to. The developers say that the software's chord detection algorithm will yield the best results for basic rock and pop songs, which prompted me to ask for some example tracks that might fair well in Riffstation's Chord Viewer.
Of the 10 titles offered, I decided against contributions from Tom Petty, Def Leppard and Bob Seger and, though I already had MP3s of Sweet Child O' Mine by GNR, Learn To Flyfrom the Foos, and Creedance Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son, I chose to buy fresh digital downloads and load them into Riffstation.
In reverse order, Riffstation's algorithm correctly identified G, C and D major for the chords in the Creedance track, but completely missed out an F major. I wasn't be able to strum along with the descending intro with any enthusiasm, as the whole section was shown as one chord (G). I tried playing along to the song using the suggested chords, but it just didn't sound quite right so I spent a little time making the necessary placement and selection corrections.
The chance to play alongside Fogerty and the boys, at least in the virtual sense, was worth the effort, and that's where I feel this software really shines. You get the opportunity to play a song with the band that performed it. If only the accuracy was a little tighter, this would be a great learning tool and an indispensable jam package.
Time for some Grohl love now, and possibly one of the best music videos ever made. Now, I have to admit that, given the amount of corrective work Riffstation has required of me so far, I wasn't too hopeful when I loaded in this FF favorite ... but knock me down with a feather and call me Susan, Riffstation went and nailed almost everything. Top marks, and a really fine example of the kind of experience this software can offer.
As I was playing at concert pitch for Sweet Child O' Mine, I needed to use the key shift to raise the key since GNR detune the guitars by half a step. I didn't have a chord chart for the long melodic intro from Slash, so started my comparison from when Axl joins in the proceedings.
Riffstation's chord detection started well, but threw in the odd unnecessary chord from time to time and things went a bit askew at the chorus. The solo sections were handled pretty well, but the finish was a bit of a letdown. Even when the mistakes are played, though (which I did), it doesn't sound too out of place for most of the song. After making some corrections (by now I was getting pretty quick at this), it was game on for my first try out as a GNR rhythm guitarist.
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