Slow down, stay in key
From a twentieth of speed up to double, with the pitch untouched, and one-tap presets at 50, 65, 75 and 85 %. Signalsmith Stretch keeps fast articulation crisp instead of smearing it.
SlowBird Jazz transcription software for macOS — learn solos by ear
Slow a chorus down without dragging it out of key. Loop the two bars that keep beating you, seamlessly, for as long as it takes. Then name that passage and keep it, so it is still there — still looped — at the next practice session.
macOS 14 or later · No account · Nothing leaves your Mac
The waveform is the instrument
Everything happens on the recording itself
Working a solo out by ear is not hard because the notes are hidden. It is hard because ordinary players fight you: you overshoot the phrase, you hunt for the spot, you lose your place, and the concentration you needed for the music goes on the transport instead. SlowBird gives you the take as a waveform you can drag, loop, mark and annotate directly — so the fiddling disappears and the listening is all that is left.
Notes
The passages you are working on, kept
Most players let you set one loop and forget it the moment you set another. SlowBird treats a hard passage as something you own: select it, name it, and it becomes a note — a post-it tag pinned to the waveform with its span washed in colour.
Click the tag and it loops. Hover it and one press removes it, for the week you finally own the phrase. Notes are saved with the track, alongside its speed, pitch, markers and last position, so opening a tune tomorrow puts you back exactly where you left off.
Pitch heat map
See what is in the chord you cannot hear
Select a bar you are stuck on and the reference keyboard lights up: one hue, brighter and larger where a pitch carries more energy across that passage. The murky bass note under a shout chorus, the alteration on the dominant, the note you keep guessing wrong — the map gives you somewhere to start.
It is deliberately honest about what it is. It reports the spectrum, folded onto equal-tempered notes and gated so a strong fundamental does not light up phantom octaves beneath it. A loud note still lights its own harmonics, which is exactly why it is drawn as heat rather than as a claim. Your ear makes the call; this narrows the field. It follows the EQ too, so cutting the rumble out of a 1928 transfer makes the keyboard agree with what you are actually hearing.
strongest in this bar
B♭A♭DF
— reads as B♭7
Your library
A shelf for the solos you are collecting
Drop in a file or a whole folder and SlowBird asks what it is — tune, soloist, instrument, year — then keeps its own copy. Your originals are never touched, moved or renamed, and deleting a track removes SlowBird's copy, never yours.
Search filters the shelf as you type, across titles, soloists and instruments, so rollins or trumpet narrows a few hundred tunes to the handful you meant. Eight colour labels tag a working set — this month's transcriptions, the tunes for Thursday, the ones you have nearly got.
Speed and pitch
Two controls that never drag each other along
Take a chorus down to 60 % and it stays in the original key, so what you learn slow is exactly what you play up to tempo. Push the pitch up a fourth for your horn and the tempo does not budge. Speed runs from a twentieth up to double; pitch moves in semitones with a ±100-cent trim for records that were never quite at A=440.
The stretching runs through Signalsmith Stretch, which holds transients together where older stretchers smear them — a fast bebop line at 40 % still articulates instead of turning to porridge. And at 100 % with no transposition the stretcher is bypassed altogether, so untouched playback is a bit-clean copy of the record.
The rest of the toolkit
Transpose, keep the tempo
Semitones for transposing instruments, plus a ±100-cent fine trim for records that were never quite at A=440.
Seamless looping
The repeat is measured to be free of clicks and dropouts — the loop wraps ahead of the stretcher, so the seam cannot exist.
Lift the soloist out
Blend L↔R to push one channel into both ears — the old trick for a hard-panned 1950s date where the horn sits on one side.
Five-band EQ
Cut the mud out of a dusty transfer or lift a buried bass line. The heat map follows the EQ, so it shows what you hear.
Markers and jumps
Drop numbered markers on the head, each chorus, the bridge, and jump straight to any of them with 1–9.
Hands on the horn
Everything has a key: space to play, [ and ] to set the loop, ⌘↑ to transpose, M to mark.
Zoom to the phrase
Pinch or scroll to zoom around the pointer, right down to individual attacks, with peaks recomputed at full resolution as you go.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no network, no telemetry. A personal tool that keeps its library in your own Application Support folder.
How it works
A practice session, start to finish
- Bring in the record. Drop the file on the window, tell SlowBird the tune, the soloist and the instrument, and it takes its own copy into your library.
- Find the solo. The whole take is a waveform. Click anywhere to play from there; drop a numbered marker on the head and on each chorus so you can jump back instantly.
- Loop the phrase. Drag across the four bars that are giving you trouble. They loop straight away — adjust an edge, or nudge it by 100 ms, until the loop breathes where the phrase does.
- Take the speed down. Pull it back to 60 %, or 40 % for a double-time run. The key does not move, so what you learn slow is what you play fast.
- Check yourself against the heat map. Stuck on one interval? Open the keyboard and see which pitches actually carry the passage.
- Name it and keep it. Save the region as a note. Next session it is still on the waveform, still looped, still waiting — and you start where you stopped instead of hunting for the spot again.
Built for one job
There is other good transcription software about, some of it long-established, and it worked most of this out first. If you have used any of it, SlowBird will feel familiar: it shares the conviction that the real problem is navigating the recording, not slowing it down.
Where SlowBird differs is narrowness. It does one job — a jazz player getting a solo off a record — and shapes everything around it. There is no notation export, no MIDI, no video, no chord-naming: those are other programs' jobs. What there is instead is a library that remembers every solo you are working through, passages you can name and keep between sessions, a modern stretcher that survives a bebop tempo, and a native Mac interface with no accounts and nothing to configure. It is a quiet, local tool for one player's ears.
Questions
Does SlowBird transcribe the solo for me?
No — and nothing else does either, honestly. Automatic audio-to-notation is still an unsolved problem for dense, expressive playing. SlowBird is a player built for transcribing: it makes the recording easy to slow down, loop, and navigate so your ear can do the work it is actually good at. The pitch heat map will show you what energy is present in a passage, but it reports the spectrum, it does not name the notes for you.
Can I slow a solo down without changing the pitch?
Yes. Speed and pitch are fully independent — slow a chorus to 45 % and it stays in the original key, or transpose it up a fourth and it keeps the original tempo. The time-stretching runs through Signalsmith Stretch, which holds transients together far better than the stock system stretcher, so a fast bebop line stays articulate instead of turning to porridge. At 100 % speed and ±0 pitch the stretcher is bypassed entirely, so untouched playback is a bit-clean copy.
How do the loops work?
Drag across the waveform and that section loops immediately — no dialog, no counting bars. Drag an edge to adjust it, or nudge either edge by 100 ms with ⌥← / ⌥→. The loop wraps the file read head upstream of the stretcher, so the seam is silent by construction — the repeat is measured to be free of both clicks and dropouts, at any speed.
What are notes, and how are they different from markers?
A marker is a single point you jump to with the number keys. A note is a whole passage you have named and kept — a bookmarked A–B region that sits on the waveform as a little post-it tag with its span washed in colour. Click one and it loops. They persist with the track, so the four bars that beat you last week are still waiting, already looped, when you sit down today.
Can it isolate the soloist on an old recording?
Often, on a hard-panned two-track. The L↔R blend slider progressively replaces one ear's content with the other channel; at the extreme, a single channel plays in both ears. On a 1950s or 1960s date where the horn sits on one side and the rhythm section on the other, that lifts the soloist forward considerably. It is channel routing, not source separation, so it cannot un-mix a modern centred stereo master.
Which audio formats can I use?
MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, AIFF/AIF, FLAC and CAF. Drop files or a whole folder on the window and SlowBird asks you to name them — title, soloist, instrument — then keeps its own copy in its library. Your original files are never moved, renamed, or referenced afterwards.
Does SlowBird need an account or an internet connection?
Neither. There are no accounts, no sign-in, no network calls and no telemetry. Your library lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Slowbird/ and stays on your Mac. The website you are reading loads no third-party fonts, scripts or trackers either.
What does it run on?
macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. It is a native Mac app — not a web page in a wrapper — so it launches instantly and scrubs a long take without stalling.
Get SlowBird
A native Mac app for transcribing jazz solos by ear. No account to make, nothing to sign in to, and no part of your library ever leaves your machine.
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Apple silicon & Intel
- MP3 · M4A · AAC · WAV · AIFF · FLAC · CAF