This article is written by Toru Hoshino, a jazz bassist and instructor based in Japan who teaches online lessons to students worldwide. In this article, he rounds up several lesser-known but genuinely useful features of the practice app iReal Pro.
iReal Pro is a practice app loved by musicians across every genre, and as a jazz player myself, I rely on it constantly — the built-in “Jazz 1450” tune set in particular gets a lot of use in my own routine. It’s a fantastic tool for practicing tunes, but it also has a handful of useful features that don’t get talked about much. Here’s a roundup.
Contents
Useful Features You Might Not Know About
Changing the Count-In
You can start a tune with no count-in, a 4-beat count-in, or an 8-beat count-in. This is adjustable in the song settings — I personally keep mine set to an 8-count.
Starting Playback Partway Through a Tune
Press and hold on any bar to start playback from that exact point. Great for drilling a specific section.
Looping a Section
Press and hold the bar where you want the loop to start, then drag to extend the selection to where you want it to end. The app will then loop just that highlighted range — another great way to drill a tricky passage.
Estimating a Song’s Tempo
If you’re listening to a track and want a rough sense of its tempo without looking it up, you can tap along to the beat on the app’s metronome-tap feature, and it’ll estimate the BPM for you. It won’t be perfectly precise, but it’s a handy way to get in the right ballpark.
Gradually Increasing the Tempo
In a tune’s tempo settings, there’s an option to automatically speed up over the course of playback — for example, setting “+10 bpm” will play the first chorus at 100 bpm, then bump it up to 110 bpm for the second chorus, and so on. Great for building speed gradually without having to keep manually adjusting the tempo yourself.
Creating Your Own Backing Track
You can also build your own chart from scratch: open a new blank chart, enter the chords bar by bar (letters for the chord, “-” for minor, “△” for major, “%” for a repeat symbol), set up barlines, repeat signs, and endings, and give it a title, composer, rhythm style, and key. Once it’s set, the app will generate a full backing track for it — and you can apply any rhythm/genre style to it, not just jazz.
Changing the Rhythm Style
Any chart can be played back in a wide range of rhythm styles — swing, Latin, bossa nova, funk, rock, 3/4 time, and more. This lets you practice the tune you’re working on, or a tune your current band is playing, in whatever feel actually matches the gig. Jazz standards like “Fly Me to the Moon” often get arranged in a 4-beat swing, a bossa nova, or 3/4 time depending on the situation, so it’s worth experimenting with different rhythm styles for whatever tune you’re working on.
Muting the Drums and Bass
You can mute the drums and bass tracks individually, leaving just the piano or guitar comping. Since the comping often doesn’t land squarely on beat 1, this is great practice for keeping solid time on your own.
Turning Off the Playback Indicator
The moving on-screen marker that shows your current position in the chart is a great visual guide, but relying on it too heavily can mean your actual chart-reading skills don’t get the workout they need — and in a real performance, you obviously won’t have it. You can turn this indicator off in the chord chart settings, which makes for a noticeably harder but more realistic practice session.
There’s a lot more depth to get out of this app than most people realize — hopefully a few of these tips are useful for your own practice.
Squeezing every feature out of a practice app is great, but it can only take you so far — getting a teacher’s read on how your timing and chart-reading actually hold up in real time is where the rest of the progress comes from.
Want Personalized Feedback on Your Playing?
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to fix alone — and where having a teacher makes all the difference.
At Line on Bass, I offer an online lesson service where you send me a video of your playing, and I give you specific, detailed feedback — every single day if you want.
Students from around the world are using this to fix exactly these kinds of issues and steadily improve their jazz bass skills.