Application Review: Capo - a working musician's best friend

I recently got asked by a buddy to fill in on bass with his band at their next show. My musical activity has been at a low point lately so I agreed and had him send me the songs we'd be playing. (You can check out Orion Walsh at myspace and blogspot.) I've heard him play a bunch of times so I already knew the gist of most of his songs but I really wanted to get the parts down note for note.

This is when I remembered an application I had been a beta user for called Capo. I looked up my license key and downloaded the app right away. For those of you not in the know, Capo is a program designed to help you learn music. Period. It allows you to load up an .mp3 file into it's beautiful and simple interface. (See screenshots at the end of this post.) You then have the option to modify the song to 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1x, and 1.5x speeds without pitch change. You can slow down that killer solo or keyboard lick and learn it note for note no matter the genre or skill level. You can also change the pitch if you want to try a different key or need to transpose a part to your instrument.

This alone would be a great feature set but there's more. You can add markers along the track to denote chorus, verse, bridge, and regular markers. This allows you to practice each piece of a song at a time until you've got it down and move on to the next piece. I love the keyboard shortcuts in this app. To add any of the aforementioned marker you just position the playhead (or during playback) and hit the corresponding letter (M, C, V, B). Using a combination of looping and the control keyboard shortcuts you can jump from marker to marker effortlessly and play each part as many time sin a row as you need to.

As a bass player, the equalizer section is a huge help to me. It has settings to isolate bass or mids or manually set the equalizer. You can also utilize the voice reduction section to reduce male or female vocals. This was great since the tracks are a bit light on bass and heavy on vocals & harmonica. I was able to remove the vocals and isolate the bass areas to hear exactly what I was going to need to play.

If you're a working musician who often has to learn new songs or just want to cover your favorite song, Capo is the perfect addition to your musical toolbox. Download the demo today and see for yourself.

Standard interface

Equalizer enabled