The Phrase Trainer is useful when learning to play sections of a song. It let's you define a starting (slow) tempo, the ending tempo, and how much to increase the tempo after the loop region has played. You can also specify the number of times to play the loop region before increasing the tempo. For example, when first learning to play a solo section, you might set the starting tempo to be 60% of the original tempo, have it end at 90% of original tempo; have it play the loop region 3 times before increasing the tempo, and have it increase the tempo in units of 5 bpms.
The Phrase Trainer is located on the bottom Tools Panel.
To use the Phrase Trainer, you must first create a Loop Region (there are many ways to do this, if you don't know how, refer to Looping). The Phrase Trainer's controls will be enabled when a loop region is active.
You can specify the start and end tempo by entering a specific bpm or as a percent of the song's bpm. Likewise, you can specify the amount to increase the tempo in bpms, percent, and the number of times you want to increment the tempo.
Below, we set the Phrase Trainer to start at 70% of the song's tempo, stop at 90% of the song's tempo, and divide the tempo range into 5 steps.
In this example, we will leave the Repeat at tempo set to the default 3 times to have the Phrase Trainer play the loop 3 times before increasing the tempo.
To enable the Phrase Trainer, click the green power button at the top-right of the panel. Click Play or hit the space bar to start playing the loop at the designated start tempo.
The Loop region displays the status of Phrase Trainer.
The top Control bar will display the current Bpm as green whenever the tempo has been modified from the song's original tempo.
Manually increase Tempo
If a passage is particularly difficult, you will want to turn off the Phrase Trainer's automated tempo increases. You do this by entering 0 for the Repeat at tempo value or hit the Clear button.
When the Repeat at tempo value is set to 0, notice that the Next Tempo button will turn green. This is to inform you that the Phrase Trainer is waiting for you to tell it when to advance to the next tempo. When you can comfortably play the passage at the current tempo, click the Next Tempo button to increase to tempo.
If the current tempo is too difficult, you can click the Prev Tempo button to reduce the tempo. You can reset the Phrase Trainer to the starting tempo by clicking the Reset button.