How to learn a song from YouTube: slow it down and loop it

Learning a song by ear from a video goes the same way for most people. The passage flies past faster than your fingers can follow, you drag the playhead back, miss the start, drag it back again, and ten minutes later you've practised scrubbing more than playing.

Two things fix that: slowing the passage down, and repeating just that passage without touching the mouse. YouTube does the first well and the second not at all. Here is how to get both, and a routine that turns them into progress.

Slow it down (the pitch stays put)

Press Shift + , to drop the speed one step, and Shift + . to raise it again. Each press moves through YouTube's preset speeds, from 0.25x to 2x in quarter steps. For something in between, like 0.85x, open the settings gear, choose Playback speed, then Custom.

Slowing down doesn't change the key, so you can play along in tune at any speed. Below about half speed the sound starts to smear, which makes fast runs harder to hear rather than easier. For most passages, 0.5x to 0.75x is the useful range.

Loop just the passage

YouTube's Loop option, on the right-click menu, repeats the whole video. That's no use for eight bars in the middle of a song, and the embed-link trick that gets passed around doesn't hold a section either; how to loop part of a YouTube video explains why.

A section loop needs something watching the playhead. YTMark does it with clips:

1. Pause just before the passage and press X. A 30-second clip starts there and loops straight away.
2. Drag the clip's ends on the progress bar to fit the passage. With a selected end, the arrow keys nudge it by a second, or a tenth of a second with Shift held.
3. Set the speed with Shift + ,. The loop keeps its ends at any speed.
4. Press Enter to save it for next time, or Esc if you only needed it now.

A routine that works

1. Listen through once at full speed and mark the sections as they go past: press B at the intro, the verse, the solo. Now the song has a map on the progress bar.
2. Start with the hardest passage, not the intro. Clip it with a second of lead-in, so there's time to find the beat before it starts.
3. Loop it slowly until you can play it cleanly three times in a row. Clean and slow beats fast and sloppy, because whatever you repeat is what you learn.
4. Speed up one step with Shift + . and do it again. Stop at 1x, or a notch past it if you want some headroom.
5. Stitch it in. Widen the clip to take in the bar before and the bar after, so the passage joins up with the rest of the song.
6. Play along with the whole song at full speed once the hard parts are done.

Watch the hands

For fingerings and chord shapes, pause and step through with , and ., one frame at a time. T gives you a wider theater-mode player, and F goes fullscreen, which helps when the camera is far from the fretboard or keyboard.

Save the passages for next session

Practice rarely ends with the song finished. Save one clip per passage and write the note for future you: “Bars 9–16, hammer-on at the 7th fret” is more use next week than “solo”. Tomorrow, press Shift+B on the video and click the clip to pick up where you left off.

Saved clips also play in your YTMark library on repeat, in any browser where you're signed in, phones included. A teacher can share a clip as a link too, so a student gets exactly the eight bars to work on; see how to share part of a YouTube video.

What YouTube can't do for musicians

YouTube can't change a song's key, so if you need to transpose to fit your voice or a capo position, you'll need a separate app. It has no count-in or metronome either. For slowing down and looping, though, everything above works right in the player, on any video.