About Soundslice

To learn a blues guitar lick, you can’t just look at some tablature in a book. You need to listen to somebody playing it, to understand the feeling.

To learn the piano part from a Mozart sonata, you can’t just listen to a virtuoso’s recording. You need to read the sheet music, to know precisely which notes to play.

To learn a 350 bpm jazz saxophone solo, you can’t just play along with the recording from day one. You need to slow it down, loop it and woodshed, one phrase at a time.

To figure out a bluegrass banjo performance from YouTube, you can’t just watch the video 50 times and try to remember it forever. You need to be able to write down your transcription, before it inevitably fades from memory.

Learning music is complicated, and we musicians are used to juggling multiple tools to deal with that. Sheet music, MP3 players, YouTube videos, slowdown/looping apps, notation/tab editing software. Why isn’t there a single tool that combines everything a musician needs?

We were frustrated by that — so we created Soundslice.

The player

How Soundslice works

Soundslice syncs audio, video and music notation into a single, elegant interface. No more juggling, no more wasting time. Our goal is to be the best way to learn any piece of music.

Everything on our site is based on the Soundslice player, a hybrid audio player / notation viewer that syncs notation with real audio. It lets you:

• View music notation/tablature synced with audio/video recordings
• Click on notation to go to that moment in the recording
• Slow down without changing pitch
• Loop sections by dragging across the notes
• Hide parts of music you don’t care about
• Zoom and re-wrap notation to fit smaller screens
• Notate music with a full-fledged notation/tab editor
• Do all of this from the comfort of your web browser, without installing anything
• And much more!

Every piece of music on our platform is called a slice. Soundslice is all about learning and teaching music via slices.

The priority

Musicians first

Soundslice was built by musicians, for musicians. Everything we do prioritizes improving musicians’ lives. We help you learn, practice, teach, share ideas, find new artists, get inspired — and even make a living.

A majority of proceeds from our store go directly to course teachers. Several people make a good chunk of their living by selling lessons on Soundslice, and we want to encourage more!

The activism

Toward a healthier Internet

These days, the Internet can be a cynical place. We try to be an antidote to that.

As you browse Soundslice, you may notice we deliberately avoid a few things.

First, we have no ads. Never have, never will. We want you to focus on learning, not being distracted.

Second, we don’t focus on numbers and stats. We deliberately don’t display things like view counts and follower counts in our community. Posting to Soundslice is not a competition for views and likes.

Third, we respect the open Internet. The web is one of mankind’s greatest inventions, and we try to be good citizens. That means we don’t do things like forcing you to log in just to view something, or disallowing links to other websites.

Fourth, we don’t sell data about our customers or include any third-party tracking.

The business

Sustainable and customer-driven

We have a simple business that works the old-fashioned way, by offering products people pay for.

We make money in three ways: charging for memberships, taking a small cut of store sales and licensing our technology.

We’ve never had any investors. Which means we don’t have venture capitalists breathing down our necks to sell out. Instead, we answer directly to our customers, using their feedback as guidance on how to improve our products.

The next step

Get started

Sound interesting? Here’s what you can do next:

• Create a free account to start creating slices yourself
• Find great musicians to follow in our community
• Browse our store for interesting courses

Thanks for stopping by!