16. Playing and practising

Follow Me

Follow Me turns the song around: instead of you keeping up with it, it keeps up with you. Play your part and the other parts follow your tempo, speeding up and slowing down with you, and waiting when you stop. Use it for music that breathes, or to play a part through at your own pace with the band behind you.

Follow Me

Available on every platform.

Starting

Choose Follow Me (⌃⌥⌘F)Follow Me (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F)Follow Me (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F (⌥⇧⌘F on a Mac)), or open the Practice band with Practice… and pick Follow Me. As with the other modes, the band names your part (‹ and › pick another track) and what it listens to: a MIDI instrument, else the audio input when it’s on. With neither, the song plays as written. Wait for Me has the details.

Press Start or play. The song waits on your part’s first note: you start, and it follows.

How it follows

Each note you play is matched to the notes of your part near where you should be by now. You can skip a few notes, and wrong notes are ignored. From the last few notes you matched, Stab works out your pace, and the song’s speed follows it, changing smoothly rather than jumping.

• Stopping: the song never plays past the next note you owe. Stop, and it holds there, as Wait for Me does. Play one of the next few notes and it goes on from there, at your tempo.
• The pill shows the tempo the song is going at now and your score: “Follow Me · Guitar · 104 BPM · 92 %”.
• Afterwards: when Follow Me stops, the song goes back to its own speed.

Options

The band shows these while Follow Me is chosen; tap one to change it.

• Reaction: how quickly the song catches up with you. Normal closes the gap over a beat, Tight over half a beat, Loose over two beats.
• The range: how far from the playing speed it may follow you: ±25 % by default, or ±10 % or ±50 %.
• Timing: Easy, Normal or Hard, as in Listen.
• Hear the Part: plays your part’s written notes along as a guide. Off, only what you play sounds on it.

Scoring

Notes are scored as in Listen, with dots under them, but against your own pace: an early or late note is judged against where you were, not where the written tempo would have been. Each pass is kept for Progress.

Follow Me isn’t available while you play together, since the transport is everyone’s. A playlist step can practise with it on its own: its menu’s Practice › Follow Me.