Developer Q&A

Below we've shared a few questions for, and answers from, Chris Liscio—the founder of SuperMegaUltraGroovy and Capo's chief developer. Read on for more about his take on Capo, and this release.

Why do you feel it's important that musicians learn songs by ear?

I think it's important to develop this skill for a number of reasons, but I think the most universal benefit is building independence. That is, you shouldn't have to wait for someone else to do the work of transcribing, or "tabbing out" a song that you want to learn to play yourself.

Also, I think that there's a personal element involved with learning songs by yourself. I see my own guitar playing as "elevated listening" where I take a song that I enjoy and try to deconstruct it a little bit and learn the parts that are meaningful to me. It's one thing to play the same notes, but it's a whole other thing to try and dig into the soul of a performance—capturing the tone, attack, and emotion of what's being played.

At what stage do you think a musician would be ready to use Capo?

I think that developing musicians can benefit from Capo fairly early in their learning, because listening to recordings repeatedly, or practicing assigned songs along with the recording at a slower pace, can be helfpul for developing an ear for music.

It also helps musicians develop timing early on because it makes practice more enjoyable. Playing along with a recording that can be adjusted to a slower speed is far more fun than playing along with a metronome on its own. I have met many musicians that are still traumatized by the sound of the metronomes from their childhood.

And Capo even includes its own metronome (with 5 different sounds to choose from) that'll help by counting you in to play along with the recording if you need it!

Doesn't Capo's technology to "speed up the process" (e.g. Chord Detection) remove the need for ear training?

I don't feel that chord detection technology has eliminated the need for ear training at all. I believe that using Capo's chord detection will force you to use your ears in a different and more subtle way than just trying to find the individual chords.

For example, Capo's Chord Intelligence engine is detecting and displaying the chord that's sounded by the band as a whole. If a guitar is playing a straight E chord, but a keyboard is playing (or the vocalist is singing) a D note at the same time then you have an E7 chord being produced by the recording.

Initially you might just roll with playing the E7 chord—and you wouldn't be wrong in doing that—but over time you will start to feel like something is off about what you're playing. That sense of noticing those subtle differences is something interesting that I've noticed myself develop over time while using Capo.

Similar senses will develop, such as hearing the difference between bends and slides on a guitar, or identifying complicated rhythms.

But none of the above are a full replacement for straight-up, "what's that chord?" ear training. Capo 3.5 now lets you disable the chord display entirely if you truly don't want (or need) a hand while starting work on a song, so that will be a big plus for users trying to build up their critical listening skills.

Speaking of the Capo 3.5 update, what can you tell us about it?

The Capo 3.5 release is primarily made up of the most-requested features from our users since Capo 3.0 shipped in October of 2013.

We get a significant amount of email from our customers, and we feel fortunate that people spend their time to let us know how we can make Capo better for them. The least we can do is collect and understand the different things that they are asking us to improve, so that we can plan a way to implement and ship those improvements.

It took a very long time to get some of these features into users' hands, so it's a gratifying release for me personally.

Doesn't all software work that way—building what customers ask for?

Unfortunately that's not realistic, and it's certainly not wise from a software usability standpoint. Furthermore, many users will never ask for things that they don't know are possible. Take chord detection, for instance. When I added that in version 2, there was nobody out there looking for it, and no other products at the time that implemented it in the way I did. And the spectrogram was—as far as I can tell—the first of its kind with a "draw to tab" workflow.

Needless to say, those features went on to excite and attract a huge collection of customers. Had I been implementing every request and whim of my customer base, Capo would be a very different product, and I don't feel it would stand out the way it does today.

So I make a concerted effort to maintain parallel sets of "wish lists", if you will. There are the requests coming in from our user base, my own todo list of features I want to build, and a third, more "secret" list that results from the R&D I am constantly doing.

Can you tell us more about this secret list?

The secret list has things on it that appear magically as a result of my ongoing research and development in signal processing, machine learning, and so on. The most recent example would be the new audio scrubbing improvements in version 3.5.

Over the summer I was doing some research into an idea for a new effect engine that—among other things—would let you "freeze" audio in time. The immediate test that I had in mind was whether I could fix the horrible-sounding scrubbing that I shipped in earlier releases of Capo.

I had no plans to deliver this feature any time soon—certainly not this year—but after building a prototype and laying my hands on it, I couldn't help but get it into the pipeline as soon as it made sense.

That's the secret list: it's the list of things that I've discovered through ongoing research and prototyping that excite me, and take Capo to that next level. New things get added (and dropped from) that list on an ongoing basis. The spectrogram, Neptune, and now the improved scrubbing are just the ones that have made it past the point of a test project on my Mac, or in some cases the seed of an idea in my head.

Why did you decide to introduce Song Views in this update? Was this a user request?

Capo is a highly unique application. There is nothing that I'm aware of that even comes close to the depth and breadth of functionality for the purpose of learning music from the original recording. When we say, "Reverse Engineering Rock 'n' Roll," I think that captures Capo's essence perfectly (if you can look past the specific genre, included for the sake of alliteration.)

I'm trying to build and cultivate a tool that can help you figure out every level of detail of a performance, from the overall basic song structure all the way down to hearing (and seeing) the difference between a bend or a slide on a guitar. If you want to go off and analyze which notes in a scale that an artist tends to play, or you're just trying to be very meticulous about learning your favorite solo, Capo lets you get to that level of detail.

The trouble with Capo's growing set of powerful features is that you can fall into the trap of making the product less approachable. And even if that's not a problem, then the problem starts to become one of organization.

A great example of this can be seen with CAD and 3D modeling software. Thousands of features exist to serve many different fields—architecture, game design, effects for film, and even software icon design! Over the years, the software gets so extremely complex that you need to take a week-long course just to understand the basics.

We started to see a lot of feedback pop up from users of Capo version 1 that said that they didn't understand the spectrogram, or they just didn't want or need that functionality—many of our users have incredible ears and don't even have to slow down the tracks to learn complicated phrases. So that repeating bit of feedback informed me that not only did we need to address Capo's growing capabilities, but also that we had to do something to serve the different ways that Capo is used.

On another front, the trouble I saw brewing was that the existing lack of "context management" (if you will) wouldn't allow me to offer entirely different ways to interact with, and annotate songs as they're being learned. What if we wanted to allow users to transcribe the lyrics from a recording? Or, what if users wanted a way to edit—in detail—the locations of bars and beats in a song with changing time signatures? If we built all those things into a single "view" of the song, then we'd quickly run out of space for the controls required to do that work.

Suffice to say, I have a lot of room to "spread my wings" now, if you will.

How did the Transcription Playhead come about?

A healthy subset of Capo's users have used other tools where the playhead behaves that way. To be honest, I originally found that mode of playback to be very difficult to understand and use when I was using those tools. It was one of the many frustrations the led me to build Capo in the first place.

This feature sat on my list for a very long time, but it wasn't until I was forced to re-organize a big part of my playback control code (to better support the Touch Bar, amusingly enough) that this became a very easy thing to build.

Now that I have it? I don't think I can live without it. I'd like to think that the way I built it—and the fact that it can be toggled—make for a superior experience.

Why did you bring the Markers back? Where did they go?

If I ranked the requests from existing users, I'd have to say the most common bit of feedback was that users missed their markers. Regions were built as a way to solve many problems with a single concept, and I decided that markers weren't necessary anymore because I was able to make that substitution.

Unfortunately, Regions just don't match the simplicity of markers, and don't fully capture how markers are used. For example, you couldn't place regions within larger regions to mark pieces of a larger solo. But I couldn't simply revert the change to remove markers because Regions really are quite useful, defining sections of a song, and providing a way to create loops. So Markers had to be built differently than before in order to work.

It turns out that the best way to improve markers was to strip them down to their simplest form. There is now only a single type of marker, and only one way to use them—to mark points of interest in a song. We did keep one thing from the old Markers implementation, though—press the M key to place them in the song!

What are your thoughts on the Touch Bar?

It's so great! Seriously, it's such a simple concept and it was executed brilliantly.

If I can talk tech a little bit, I think it's fantastic that the Touch Bar's contents are tied to the "first responder" as you're working. That is, the currently focused application, and its currently-focused control, define the controls that are available in the Touch Bar.

That means an application like Capo will show you the controls for moving around the entire song when it's first loaded, but if you go to edit a Region's title then you'll see the Emoji controls as your typing. While it's cool that you can easily enter Emoji into a Region's title, that's not really the point. The point is that your available functions change as you use an application, depending on what you're currently doing.

How is the Touch Bar used by Capo?

Right now, Capo's most notable control on the Touch Bar is the Waveform overview scrubber. You can quickly jump around a song with a single tap, and if you have Regions placed, their colors will appear in the waveform so you know where to tap. You can also hold your finger on the scrubber to activate the new scrubbing engine so you can hear whether you're in the right place. The scrubbing is really fun to play with, because it's so responsive and fast.

In addition to the scrubber, I made the most common playback controls accessible in the Touch Bar, and by default I include a button to toggle the Transcription Playhead on and off. But I didn't stop there—you can customize the Touch Bar to also include the metronome and song settings buttons from the bottom bar.

Personally, I removed the play/pause button from my own Touch Bar because I tend to use my space bar to trigger playback, and I expect a lot of users to customize the controls on theirs as well. Customization is one of the best aspects of the Touch Bar, in my opinion. It's far superior to having users come up with a set of byzantine keystrokes to control an application the way they want.

There's certainly a lot more to come for the Touch Bar, so keep your eye out for those changes in future releases.

To close this Q&A, is there anything else you'd like to share about this release?

I think that Capo 3.5 is a very important update because it lays a strong foundation for a long list of features that I have planned for the future. It took a great deal of design and effort to get Capo to this stage, and I'm very proud of the final product.

One thing I'd like to call attention to is the upcoming price change for early 2017. Capo 3 originally launched with a large price cut compared to the previous versions. The pricing was designed to make an upgrade to Capo 3 easier for our direct-sale customers moving to the Mac App Store, and to attract more customers during the launch.

Since the Capo 3 launch, Capo has gained some really big functionality, and I don't feel that $29.99 accurately captures the value of the product anymore. Knowing what I know about Capo's future, it will make even less sense in the coming year or two.

So starting early next year, Capo will return to its original price of $49.99, but we will maintain the current $29.99 pricing until then. Call it a 40%-off sale for the holiday season, if you will. If you're on the fence about buying, now's definitely the time to jump in!

Capo is an incredible collection of technology that is still unmatched by anything else on the market. Its design, functionality, and feature set are far more valuable than the $50 we ask for it. Cheaper than a few song books, a new guitar strap, a few sets of strings, etc.

The value you get out of the skills you learn using Capo will exceed that of any one piece of gear that you could get at your local music store, and it will continue to pay off the more you use it.

Return to the Press Kit