Music teacher here, and I have a question about accompaniment widgets. Hal Leonard has an incredible audio playback widget on their website called Playback + which has audio recordings for the songs in their instructional books. You can toggle the playback switch so that you can only hear the rhythm, or the lead, or a blend of both. You can also change the pitch, or slow it down and speed it up without changing the pitch. It’s really cool and helpful. I’d like to be able to purchase something like it, or build one, to embed in my own website for my students to practice the songs we are working on. That would also require me to upload my own recordings. Would anyone know how to even start on a project like this? I’ve attached a pic of Playback+'s interface.
Cheers,
~Matt
It looks like Playback+ might be proprietary to Hal Leonard. Not sure it’s the type of thing that has an API and you can embed in any site. Maybe contact them directly and ask???
Building your own would take a lot of coding. Not sure what your skills are in that department but if you had to hire someone to do this for you from scratch that would be ungodly expensive.
Maybe a good alternative is SoundSlice? That I know of it doesn’t toggle rhythm / lead but it’s possible you could have multiple recordings and the player could swap tracks. It definitely does the multi-speed and even looping. In general though it’s a great product. Since it’s got an API the above comment about doing your own code or hiring would be much much less involved and much cheaper. Troy’s done this himself on his site.
Actually, thinking through my last comment, there’s a totally free way you could do this right now. Not sure how hi-fi you want to get.
Soundslice is free, so is YouTube. You could record yourself and upload that to YouTube. You can then make a SoundSlice file and use the YouTube link to create the Slice.
Then you could just share the SoundSlice link with your students either by email or put it on your website. You wouldn’t have to pay for storage.
Getting your students to buy Reaper (for $60) or something similar might be a better investment. Licensing or creating software quickly becomes very expensive.
Reaper can combine tracks, create loops, slow tracks down, and pitch shift them and so much more (as you probably know!). It’ll also make it possible for your students to record themselves and then listen back critically. That’ll open the door to fixing details they weren’t able to notice when so much of their attention was directed at instrument.
That is a cool idea. Depending on the student though, that could be a HUGE learning curve and they’d have to buy an interface too. Guitar lessons could quickly turn into recording lessons. Could be frustrating for some. Depending on the age and if these are parent-funded lessons, parents may or may not be cool with that. Just thinking about all that from my experience. I taught full time from the early 2000’s until about 2016 and never jumped on any of the tech band wagon stuff for lessons. I know getting my students to use a DAW just would not fly with the vast majority of them. Throwing something up on SoundSlice and a brief tutorial, plenty would have been fine with that. I guess at the end of the day it depends on the student.
Tagging @JakeEstner too since he teaches full time and utilizes tech in the lessons to an extent as I understand. He’ll have some great suggestions I am sure.
It looks like Playback+ might be proprietary to Hal Leonard.
Yeah, it definitely is and there is nothing about it online. I’m sure they keep it under lock and key. I had never heard of SoundSlice and that might be the best option. I like that there is a video component to it so that my students can see me and my hands. It definitely makes sense to start cheap before developing software.
Good stuff.
It’s pretty great. I see you have a membership so you’ve likely seen SoundSlice in action 
Any of the short video clips Troy plays that have the tabs included are in SoundSlice. This for example:
Same with the various clips from all the interviews.
Tabs are optional but that could be another great tool for you and your students (time consuming though!).
Soundslice definitely the way to go, the animated TAB makes it even better. Although you won’t have the option of disabling instruments, it can be done in a roundabout way by uploading multiple audio versions and just selecting which one you want to play. $5 month if you want to upload your own audio, free if you direct link to Youtube. IMO $5 month is a no-brainer, even if you only use it as your own practice tool or want to regularly transcribe / slow down / loop etc.
Personally I would like something like the Hal Leonard widget on my own website, but I’ve looked into this on a few occasions and every option is going to be very expensive or very complicated.
Soundslice is a great compromise. You can embed functional preview style slices on your website which can be clicked on to take you to full functioning version on your Soundslice page. Full website embed is an option but unless you have a ton of students it’s probably not worth the expense.
Former dev here. I’d start with soundslide or YouTube first to get started, and then explore a custom player if you want to.
FWIW I don’t think that a custom player would be that tough:
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the player can be done with HTML, I believe … you’d probably need two players for lead and rhythm, and then just link them both up to the playback button: Create a Music Player using JavaScript - GeeksforGeeks
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playback speed is apparently also available: Web Audio playbackRate explained - Developer guides | MDN
I don’t have access to a dev machine, but you might be able to find someone with JavaScript experience who can do a proof of concept.
Note: I still strongly recommend you start with YouTube or soundslice. Available and working and suitable beats custom build every time.
Cheers! Jz
I should add: it always looks easy until you start, and then something weird comes up, some limitation, some odd behaviour. That’s the problem with software!
I was about to say something like that lol! I always build amazing things…until clients start using it and asking for stuff I never anticipated ha! Great articles you linked though! I’d say the general consensus is leaning heavily towards SoundSlice because there are SO many great things it does, even in the free tier.
Plus, if the students reeeeeally wanted to isolate the rhythm track, there could just be a separate soundslice.