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Riffstation was a very promising app: not only will it slow down music for transcribing music, but it will show the chords for song song with a reported approx 80% accuracy. It will allow the chords shown to be edited if the app gets them wrong.
I talked to the engineer who was developing this program and at that time, it would indicate major & minor chords but the plan was to release the next version with the ability to determine major 7, minor 7 and dominant 7 chords plus have the ability to print chord charts for songs.
Once that revision was in place and working correctly, they hoped to develop it to the point that it would detect altered & extended chords – a jazz player’s dream!But….Fender bought the company and scrapped the project… True story. Just like many of the companies that large corporations buy up, they rob what technology is profitable for their interests and trash the rest.
fortunately, the original full version is available as a free download; click on the link below, on the right side of the page, you will see Windows Executable.
Click on that, download & install. Very easy to use program and very useful -
Many thanks for posting this Keith. I wondered what became of Riffstation and didn’t know about the Fender buyout. I knew they ran into copyright issues before then, because of the power of the software, and for a while, gave the software away for free. I grabbed a copy and carefully copied it across to new PCs when I upgraded them.
Its an awesome piece of software. Not only was it good at identifying the chords and the other things you mention, but it made an excellent job of marking out where the beats fell too. That helped transcribing immensely too.I lost my copy when I moved to Mac but it looks like you can grab a Mac version on the same website…here….(and just have 👍)
https://archive.org/details/Riffstation
Its Riffstation as opposed to Riffstation Pro but I don’t know what the difference is.
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Many thanks for posting this Keith. I wondered what became of Riffstation and didn’t know about the Fender buyout. I knew they ran into copyright issues before then, because of the power of the software, and for a while, gave the software away for free. I grabbed a copy and carefully copied it across to new PCs when I upgraded them.
Its an awesome piece of software. Not only was it good at identifying the chords and the other things you mention, but it made an excellent job of marking out where the beats fell too. That helped transcribing immensely too.I lost my copy when I moved to Mac but it looks like you can grab a Mac version on the same website…here….(and just have 👍)
https://archive.org/details/Riffstation
Its Riffstation as opposed to Riffstation Pro but I don’t know what the difference is.
Possibly, the Pro version would have been the version that included the ability to detect the chords that I mentioned and the ability to print chord charts
Shame that Fender scrapped the development of Riff Station. The only program of this nature that I think was better was TransKriber by Reed Kotler. It worked up to Windows XP but when Windows 7 happened, Reed Kotler had no interest in further developing it to work with newer versions of Windows
At some point, I want to try Moises or some other AI program that I can completely remove certain parts of songs
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Keith, since you’re interested in separating stems in songs, I thought I would mention RipX DAW by Hit ‘N Mix. It’s what I use to separate the guitar, drums, vocals, etc. It’s sort of expensive at US $99 but it’s a one-time purchase instead of monthly/annually.
It has a lot of other uses as well but I’m not familiar with it other than separating instruments and vocals. I know you can edit songs note by note, adjust tempo and pitch, add effects, it will attempt to display chords and fingerings for guitar, and it has instrument loops etc. They have a free trial available.
Joe
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,
Or the strength of an Oak with roots deep in the ground.
--Graeme Edge -
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First there was Anytune, a music-slow-downer app designed for Apple stuff. Then along came Riffstation, with a huge amount of hype about all the cool stuff it could do (copied from Anytune). Anytune has the ability to isolate a particular instrument or voice, same as Riffstation. I don’t know which has the better ability, because I’ve only used Anytune for this purpose (although I also have Riffstation). I do know that none of the instrument isolation apps can do a perfect job for all songs. If you want to isolate the lead guitar track from a ZZ Top song, it works pretty well because there are only 3 instruments: Lead guitar, bass, and drums. But if you want to isolate the lead guitar from a large band with many instruments, none of them will do a decent job.
It’s a pity that Fender bought out Riffstation. They just bought it and killed it. But maybe there is less and less need for such apps, now that more and more tabs are available. If I can find the tabs for “Blue Sky” by the Allman Bros, why would I want to isolate the lead guitar and listen to it over and over to memorize it?
Sunjamr Steve
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Even though more & more tabs are becoming available, the programs like Riffstation, RipX DAW, Moises etc are for those obscure Allman Brothers songs, or Doobie Brothers songs, or Ten Years After or Savoy Brown songs that will never be transcribed. There are many performers whose works that will never be transcribed that some would want to learn
Those programs are for learning those harmony lines rhythm parts that can scantly be heard yet it’s obvious that they play an important part in the song.
I think that these programs would be especially helpful in the jazz world. The late great Herb Ellis had style of playing such melodies & harmony lines behind other players while they were soloing or as he was accompanying a singer and to be able hear such parts and accurately learn them without a transcription would be pricelessAnd personally, I think that learning a part by ear and employing it into our playing, not just in the song that we learned it from, helps us to develop as a musician. Those that we look up to as our “heroes” – Jimi, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, EC, Alvin Lee, Kim Simmonds, Mark Knopfler, Tom Johnston etc etc – no doubt they had an old school record player capable of playing at 16 RPM that they slowed down their favorite records, picked the tone arm up and replayed sections over & over until they had learned the song.
Keith
aka GnLguy -
I decided to give Riffstation for Mac a try and have a couple questions someone might be able to help me with.
What is the “mode selection” in Jam Master for?
I don’t understand Riff Builder…what is it for?
Joe
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,
Or the strength of an Oak with roots deep in the ground.
--Graeme Edge-
I decided to give Riffstation for Mac a try and have a couple questions someone might be able to help me with.
What is the “mode selection” in Jam Master for?
I don’t understand Riff Builder…what is it for?
Joe
Like any piece of legacy equipment or software, documentation can be difficult to come by.
Fortunately, there are several videos on You Tube that was posted 10-12 years ago.I haven’t found anything on Mode Select at this point but if you will click on the + button, you will hear subtle differences in the song. It seems to be a type of parametric EQ that will accentuate the sound spectrum in slightly different ways
Here’s an explanation of Riff Builder; it will take time to get a grip on it but I think that it will be useful once we do
I’ve not watched all of these yet but here is a playlist of various how-to videos for Riffstation; there are more available but many answers may be found in these videos
Keith
aka GnLguy
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A very similar program for windows & mac is ‘Song Master’. It is not free and costs about $60 usd but the developer seems to be quite active.
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Thought I would post a screenshot of RipX. It’s quite easy to use. You just drag and drop an audio file and it automatically processes it and separates the different instruments. Each instrument is in a different color and you can edit each note if you want (I never use it like that). You can just click on any instrument to solo or mute it. It does fail good at separating the instruments but has difficulties sometimes distinguishing say guitar from piano. But it does a good enough job that I can use the bass and drums alone as a backing track. Or just listen to the guitar to learn a solo. Or separate the vocals and use them only. Each instrument can be exported to an audio file of it’s own for importing into a DAW.
Joe
The sight of a touch, or the scent of a sound,
Or the strength of an Oak with roots deep in the ground.
--Graeme Edge
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