16. Playing and practising

Practising by microphone

You don’t need a MIDI instrument to practise. With the audio input on, Wait for Me, Listen and Follow Me hear the notes you play on a real instrument, through the built-in microphone or an audio interface, and check them against your part.

Practising by microphone

Available on Mac and Windows. Not on Web.

This isn’t on Web.

When practice listens to the audio input

Practice listens to a MIDI instrument first. It listens to the audio input when:

• the audio input is on and no MIDI instrument is plugged in, or
• Record Audio InputRecord Audio Input (not on Web) is on, even with a MIDI instrument plugged in.

Turn the input on with On in the Audio tab of the Audio & MIDI pane, and allow Stab to use the microphone if you’re asked. The Practice band then says “Listens to” and the input’s name, with “(notes and chords)”. In a narrow pane, it says only “Play a note to check”, or the note it heard. If the input is off, or the microphone isn’t allowed, the band says that instead, in red, and the song plays as written.

Setting up

1. Use headphones if you can. The band reminds you: they keep the song out of the microphone. Stab ignores notes that the backing has just played out of the speakers, but one microphone can’t always tell them from yours.
2. Teach Stab your guitar’s tuning. Open the Tuner (⌥⌘U)Tuner (Ctrl+Alt+U)Tuner (not on Web) with your part’s track armed or worked in, and play each open string. The tuner counts the strings it has heard (“Practice by ear: play each string”), then says it’s set to your guitar. Practice then checks chords against the way your guitar is actually tuned.
3. Calibrate the input’s latency: the Audio tab’s Calibrate plays a click and listens for it, so your notes are placed where you played them. It needs the click to reach the microphone, so do this without headphones.
4. Choose a mode and play a note: the band shows the note it heard.

What it hears

• Single notes are heard one at a time, at the moment they began. A note an octave off the one you’re meant to play counts as that note: low strings and microphones often slip an octave.
• Chords: where your part has two or more notes together, Stab doesn’t try to read the chord; it checks whether each of the notes you’re meant to play is sounding. The ones it finds count as played. The pill shows what it heard, then “not” and the notes it didn’t.
• Strings aren’t checked. Stab hears the pitch, not which string you played it on, and the band says “strings not checked”.

Notes from a microphone come a little later than from a MIDI instrument, a chord a little more, so Listen waits that much before it calls a note missed.

Getting the best from it

An audio interface gives the cleanest signal; the built-in microphone hears the room too. Chords are checked note by note, so a strum with a string that doesn’t ring may not count every note.