Practising guitar with Yalaloop

Slow down, loop, and learn the songs you want to play.

I started building Yalaloop because Audacity wasn’t built for practice. I was working through the fingerpicking pattern in “Love You More” by Racoon — fast 16th notes with a shuffle feel — and to really nail the timing I needed to slow it down and loop a single bar perfectly, over and over. Audacity could do the slow-down and the loop, but it couldn’t keep multiple practice sections per track, and switching to a different song meant rebuilding everything from scratch.

Yalaloop is the tool I wished I’d had.

Audio you can actually load

Yalaloop opens audio files on your device. Streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music’s own subscription) are DRM-locked and won’t load into a practice app — you need files you’ve actually purchased and downloaded.

Practical sources:

• iTunes / Apple Music Store — sells DRM-free AAC files since 2009.
• Bandcamp — artist-direct, often offers lossless FLAC alongside MP3.
• 7digital, Qobuz, ProStudioMasters — paid downloads with HiFi options.

When you want only the guitar

Some songs are easier to learn when the rhythm section is muted. LALAL.AI is the cleanest stem-splitting service today — upload the track, get back separated vocal / drums / bass / guitar / other stems, then load the stem you want into Yalaloop. It’s a paid online tool with a free trial.

Yalaloop will integrate stem splitting directly in a future release; until then, the upload-and-import flow works.

How I actually use it

Three workflows that come up most often in my own practice:

• Drilling a tricky timing pattern. Loop a one-bar section, slow it down well below tempo, count along to internalise the rhythm, then incrementally bring the tempo back up.
• Working out a technical passage. Loop the bar, slow it to half tempo, listen for the articulation (which notes are hammered, which are pulled off), and play along until the fingers know it.
• Practising songs I can sing. Pitch-shift the recording 2 or 3 semitones to a key my voice can hit, set a loop over the verse and chorus, and play along.

Setup happens on my laptop, where the bigger screen makes loop-boundary drag-select easier. The actual practice happens on my phone with the guitar in my hands — same loops, same settings, ready to go.

Common questions

Part of the Melody Matrix ecosystem.