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Riffstation is a new guitar learning software developed by Sonic Ladder Ltd. It’s billed as the ultimate jam and practice tool for guitar players. It’s got a bunch of features including slow down, key change and guitar isolation technology and lots more.
What immediately stands out about this product is that you can use the music you already have on your pc or iPod in wav, mp3, wma formats. It allows you to take your favorite songs and manipulate them to learn the chords and riffs, create your own backing bracks, and build new riffs and songs.
I recently had an chance to interview Dan Barry, one of the founders and developers of Riffstation to talk about the development of this software and the technology behind. I highly recommend that you check out Riffstation for yourself.
Interview with Dan Barry of Riffstation
1. How long did it take to develop the Riffstation software which allows you to learn the chords, master the riffs and create custom jam tracks using songs in your own music collection?
DB: We formed the company in late 2010 and began developing Riffstation as a product in early 2011, so I guess you could say it was in commercial development for about a year but we had all been working on some of the technologies in Riffstation for several years before that. Our guitar isolation technology dates back to 2004 believe it or not!
2. The Riffstation development team also includes Mikel Gainza, Martin Gallagher, how did you guys first get together? And can you share a little bit about how this idea for this product came to be?
DB: Mikel and I founded the Audio research Group in a university in Dublin in 2006. Martin joined one of our projects in 2007. We all have an engineering/computing background and we are all guitar players so when we decided to form a company we know what our first product would be.
We specialized in developing algorithms for music and audio processing and we always had a slant on building tools which were useful for learning so Riffstation was a combination of all the things we do well. Riffstation is the kind of thing we wished we had when we were learning guitar, so figured we’d build it.
3. In my view, the coolest feature is being able to use your own music collection to learn songs and mix new jam tracks instead of midi files. Was this feature the critical to your vision for Riffstation?




