Activate user account

Example: Bring Me My Shotgun by Lightnin' Hopkins

The goal of Ploddings, for users, is to help in getting down the sound of pre-war blues style music. This section is meant to demonstrate the 2-tools that the Ploddings site provides to help in this goal: (i) the slow-downer tool, and (ii) the MuseScore transcription tablature.

As an example, imagine that the Lightnin' Hopkins sound on Bring Me My Shotgun is set as the 'goal sound'. An E-blues in the style of Lightnin' Hopkins is doable to get 20% or 30% down, but the remaining 70% or 80% – the rhythmic hesitations, the subtle fingerpicked rakes, the usage of the open strings – are easily overlooked and easier still to round-off as not being there at all. Small wonder then why, in listening back to the practicer's playing, it often doesn't quite sound like Lightnin' Hopkins, even though the criteria appears to be met.

a) the Slow-Downer Tool

To pick-out the details of the pitches and the rhythms, slowing down the original recording of Bring Me My Shotgun, even to 25% speed, can be helpful for tasks like creating a transcription; details that seem unnoticeable at 100% normal speed can become front-and-centre at 50% or 45% speed. For playing alongside the recording, the slow-downer can be set to a lower speed, for example 65% speed, and then steadily increased until the tempo has returned to 95% or 100% speed.

Note: The slow-downer tool is available for all songs on the Ploddings library. It can also be used to loop particular sections, and can pitch-shift the recording to help match the tuning to a physical guitar.

b) the MuseScore Tablature

The songs in the Ploddings library each have a transcription; that is, note-for-note guitar tablature of the song, which has been derived by blah148, using the slow-downer tool. Unlike earlier iterations of the Ploddings site, that focused more on video demonstrations, the MuseScore tablature allows for more accountability of accuracy, since any user can click the "play" button on the interactive tablature, listen to the tablature, and compare it with the original recording. MuseScore is not-for-profit; it is open-source and free for anyone to use.

The combination of the: (i) slow-downer tool and the (ii) interactive tablature is not promised as a "magic bullet" to understand and internalize the music. For example, seeing various "pickup" notes that lead into other notes, which initially may not have been so obvious without these implements, does not guarantee that all viewers will then acknowledge such details in their own playing. However, used in its suggested ways it could conceivably abbreviate learning timespans, when compared to just listening at full-speed to the original recordings of songs such as Bring Me My Shotgun; these are some suggested use-cases:

• Use the slow-downer tool to make transcriptions, and compare those transcriptions with the ploddings transcriptions,
• Play and/or sing alongside the slow-downer tool, and progressively increase the tempo to match the original recording,
• Examine the interactive tablature for unexpected pitch/rhythm details that can help inform future guitar playing