Accessibility is the practice of making products, services, and environments usable by as many people as possible, including those with disabilities.
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience.
Accessibility is not just an issue for the disabled; it affects everyone. We will use the term accessibility to refer to both accessibility and usability (aka UX).
The key issue that NetTracks addresses is the accessibility of playing along with other musicians or their recordings. This has always been the fundamental way we learn music.
Over centuries, recording and other technology have increased our access to music and music education facilities, but the core thing we strive for and need to develop is playing along to other musicians. Playing along develops our ears, our taste, and our enjoyment.
The accessibility problem with backing tracks
We new musicians only get to sit in regularly with experienced musicians if we grow up in a family of musicians. If we don’t have that opportunity, we tend to falter. The evergreen advice has been to play along to artists‘ backing tracks, which are created just to introduce new musicians to playing with experienced ones. These tracks generally come with approachable lead sheets detailing the melody, harmony (as chord symbols), and sometimes the lyrics as well.
This is a great way to begin to learn to play music – with simplified melodies to great songs, the construction of chords, which also can be simplified, and with lyrics we know – all while playing with talented musicians with excellent taste who know the songs well. This music-minus-1 genre is the most recommended approach by music teachers of popular music. There is a problem, though, and one that has been getting worse – accessibility.
Adoption Friction
Today, the bleeding edge of play along, often looks like this –
- Ask around and then search the internet for vendors. Buy online using your credit card.
- Get a link, download audio files from the link, and decide where to keep them.
- Copy the audio files to your mobile device (phone or slate), because that’s why you have a mobile device – for its convenience.
- Discover that you cannot find your files on the device because the vendor didn’t add the audio file tagging that the Music app uses.
- Play around with this until you can play one of the files in the collection.
- Figure out that you don’t know what key it is in and whether there is an introductory section before the main tunes start. You play it a few times to figure that out. You now need a place to keep this information because you will need it again next time you play this track.
- You wish you had purchased backing tracks that had this information embedded somehow.
- You figure out the audio player you are using, say, Music, doesn’t suit the needs of play along very well. You want to bring up a chord chart at the same time as playing along, but orchestrating the use of the two apps at once is a problem.
- You now have more needs. You want to play just the LHS stereo channel, as that’s where the music-minus-1 arrangement for your instrument is. The app won’t do that.
- You choose another one of the tracks to play. You don’t know that song in that key, so you want to change the audio key but cannot do that with the standard Music player.
- You decide to have a short performance with your friends – baby steps at performing – and you want to create a setlist. You want to remove the noise at the start of the file and fade into the beginning of the track, but you cannot do any of these things.
- If you want to learn a song in Eb Major, you cannot search for songs by musical key. That information isn’t available or searchable.
- Your grandad comes to visit from overseas, and you are talking about learning to play music. He explains how much easier and better it all was in the 1950s when Jamey Aebersold brought out his catalogues of play-alongs.
This experience is so bad that many people do not persist in using backing tracks and, as a result, often do not persist in learning to play music at all. There are so many broken dreams. It should not be this way.
NetTracks Accessibility
Accessibility is the key driver for the NetTracks technology.
That’s why tracks are streamed from NetTracks. That way, we can ensure they contain the required metadata and that the app and the stream work together. You always get all the essential metadata embedded with the track, and the app knows how to interpret it. You are still playing high-quality audio recordings of top musicians, but with rich metadata, giving you a much more accessible experience.
That’s also why we built an audio player for music-minus-1 backing tracks. It has stereo balance built into the player. The player itself displays the arrangement and rhythm information. It tracks the progress of the audio, showing repeat marks, so you know how many repeats of the song form you have before returning to the final repeat to play the head again. All the changes you make with the audio player while playing a track are stored with the track for future plays, like volume, stereo panning, fading, and, as of release 5 of NetTracks, tempo adjustments, pitch adjustments, and reverb. These are features inspired by modern audio generation apps like iRealPro. However, you are still playing high-quality audio recordings of top musicians, but with rich audio facilities, giving you a much more accessible experience.
NetTracks also increases accessibility by making the lead sheet part of the track, so, as you play the track, the lead sheet can immediately be shown full-screen, and any zooming or shifting of the image you do is also stored with the track for future plays. So accessible.
Setlists are also built into the app, so you can arrange your lists for any purpose and share them from within the app. This way, the others get the same list of tracks right in the app. So helpful for band practice.
Looking Back
We have a genuine admiration for what Jamey Aebersold achieved with his catalogues. His diligence and hard work created a great resource of top artists performing music minus one, but also with leading class accessibility of the day. The booklet of lead sheets has all the arrangement details on the lead sheet – tempos, intros, number of repeats of the form – all there on the lead sheet, visible as you learn the song, playing along with the greats.
It is time to stop degrading accessibility and take up the challenge of providing students with great accessibility once again.