How to slow down a YouTube video (and keep it in tune)

YouTube’s own speed menu offers seven fixed steps, and the useful ones for learning are 0.5× and 0.75×. That is a coarse instrument. The gap between them is where most difficult material actually sits, and there is no way to loop a section while you are down there.

Getting fine control

1. 01

   Load the video

   Paste the YouTube link into TubeRepeat. The player appears with the transport bar underneath it.

2. 02

   Set the speed

   Use the speed box in the transport bar, or press Shift + comma to go slower and Shift + full stop to go faster. Each press moves 0.05×, so you can settle between the usual presets.

3. 03

   Loop the hard part

   Press [ and ] to mark the start and end of the passage. Slow playback plus a tight loop is what actually makes something stick — either one alone does less.

4. 04

   Let the speed climb back

   In the practice settings, set the ramp to add 0.02× per pass with a ceiling of 1×. The drill walks itself up to full tempo while you keep playing.

The speed box shows the current rate and accepts the standard presets, but the − and + buttons either side of it move in 0.05× steps, as do Shift + , and Shift + .. Press 0 at any point to snap back to 1× and hear where you actually are.

Why the pitch stays put

Slowing a record down lowers its pitch, because the same waveform is being read out more slowly. Digital players do something different: they cut the audio into short grains and repeat or drop them, which changes the duration without changing the frequency. The practical result is that a guitar solo at 0.6× is still in the original key, and what you learn slowly transfers directly to playing it fast.

The trade-off is artefacts. Time-stretching sounds increasingly synthetic the further it goes, particularly on cymbals and reverb tails. That is why the slowest usable speed is often higher than people expect.

Letting the speed climb on its own

The awkward part of the method above is that you have to keep stopping to change the speed, and stopping is where practice sessions die. The speed ramp removes that step.

Open the practice settings and set Add per pass to a small number — 0.01× or 0.02× — and Stop climbing at to your target, usually 1×. Now every completed pass of the loop is slightly faster than the last. Starting at 0.6× with a 0.02× step reaches full speed after twenty passes, which on a ten-second phrase is about three and a half minutes.

Two settings pair well with it. A rest between passes gives you a beat to reset your hands. A lead-in before A rewinds a fraction past the marker so the first note is never clipped by the seek.

Speed remembered with the section

When you save a range as a section, the speed you were using is saved with it. A solo taken apart into four sections can have four different tempos — the fast run at 0.5×, the bends at 0.9× — and clicking between them puts both the range and the speed back. There is more about that in the guide to taking a solo apart.

Questions people ask