Overview

TrackWise is a backing-track player and librarian. Browse the library, pick something to play over, slow it down or loop a section to work on, read the chords as they go past, and export exactly the part you want to your looper pedal. When you'd rather not play over a recording at all, it will also generate a drone in any key.

The app is free and stays free. It shares one account and one library with NeckWise, the fretboard-study companion — sign in once and both apps know you.

The sidebar's Selected track panel deliberately shows only what the track list isn't already showing — turn a column on and it drops out of the sidebar, turn it off and it comes back. The progression name and any intro note sit directly above the chart, where you read them.

Nothing you do here changes the underlying tracks. Practice tempo, loop points, zoom, and column layout are all yours and local to your browser.

Finding a track

The track list is the main event. Everything that narrows it lives either on the list's own head row (search, the match count, Show all), in the sidebar (scope and saved views) or in the column headers themselves.

Search & scope

Search sits at the top of the track list itself, above the column headers. It matches titles, instructors, courses and tags at once, and stacks on top of whatever filters are already active — it narrows what you can see, it doesn't reset it.

Beside it, the match count reads 21/36 whenever anything is narrowing the list, and just the total when nothing is. Show all appears alongside while a narrowing is held, and releases all of it at once — search, every column filter and the library scope. It leaves your sort, your columns and the track you have selected exactly as they were: it changes what you're looking at, not how you're looking at it.

Browse by instructor and course

Browse in the same row opens two panes above the list — Instructor on the left, Course on the right — each listing what's in your library with a count beside it. Pick one and the list narrows to it; pick All instructors or All courses to release that pane. The Course pane always shows the courses belonging to whatever instructor you've picked, so the two work together rather than fighting.

Browse is the same filter as the Instructor and Course column funnels, shown a different way — pick an instructor in a pane and you'll see that column's funnel light up too. There is one filter underneath, so you can start in either place and finish in the other, and Show all clears both.

All tracks / My library switches between the whole library and just the tracks you personally own. "My library" only appears if you actually have private tracks.

Column filters

Every filterable column has a small funnel in its header. Click it for a checkbox list of every value in that column, each with a live count of how many tracks would match.

A filtered column tells you what it's filtered to. Its header highlights and shows the value you picked instead of the column name — or Multiple if you picked several, with the full list in the tooltip. So you can read the whole active filter straight off the header row without opening anything.

• Checking several boxes in one column means any of these — checking swing and shuffle under Feel shows tracks that are either.
• Filters across different columns stack — Key A plus Feel shuffle shows only tracks that are both.
• Unchecking a box clears that value again. The counts update as you go, so you can see what's left before you commit to a click.

Every column works the same way, including Chart — so "show me everything that already has a verified chart" is just a checkbox.

Two column names aren't self-explanatory:

• Family is the shape of the backing — 12-bar blues, 8-bar blues, quick IV, vamp, drone. It's the fastest way to find "something to blow over" versus a real form to navigate. A vamp sits on one chord with a definite quality; a drone is a sustained root and fifth with no third at all, so any mode works over it. Not every track has one.
• Feel is how it moves — straight, swing, shuffle, slow — and is independent of Family, so 12-bar blues + shuffle is a normal thing to ask for.

The Loop column

Turn on the Loop column (from ⚙ at the right of the header row) to see which tracks have a loop saved and how long it is — ↻ 18s, ↻ 1:30. It's coloured when the loop is switched on and muted when it's saved but off, matching the way the waveform shades the region itself.

Like every other column it filters and sorts: has a loop, loop switched on, no loop. Sorting puts the shortest loops first, and tracks without one sort last whichever direction you pick.

It's off by default, because most tracks won't have a loop and a column of dashes earns nothing.

Columns & saved views

• Sort — click a column's label. Click again to reverse.
• Choose columns — the ⚙ at the right end of the header row. Course and Source are hidden by default; turn them on if you want them.
• Resize — drag the right edge of any column header. Double-click that edge to snap the column to its widest content, header and filter icon included. Widths stick between visits.
• Saved views — + Save current view in the sidebar pins the whole current setup under a name: filters, search, scope, sort, which columns are shown and how wide they are. Click it any time to snap back; hover and hit × to remove it.

The player

Click any row and it loads into the bench at the top of the page. The bench stays put while you scroll the list, so you can keep browsing without losing what's playing.

Two kinds of source

The bench plays one source at a time. The Track / Drone switch sits in the player's own title row, next to the Librarian / Player switch:

• Track — the track selected in the list. Everything else on this page is about these.
• Drone — a sustained chord generated on the spot, in any key and quality, with no track involved at all. See the drone.

They're alternatives, not layers — only one sounds at a time — but swapping between them moves nothing on the page. The drone's controls appear exactly where the waveform was, so the track list below stays put and you can flip back and forth without hunting for your place.

Librarian & Player modes

The toggle at the top right of the player switches between two views of the same app:

• Librarian — the track list is the main event, with the sidebar, filters, saved views and metadata editing. This is where you find things, tidy them up, import and export.
• Player — the list collapses to a single row and the sidebar hides, so the chart gets the whole window (about two and a half times the area). This is where you work on a track.

The player itself — transport, waveform, loop, speed, click — is identical in both, so you can always hear a track whichever view you're in. The choice is only whether you're choosing or working.

In Player mode the single row carries ◀ ▶ to step through the tracks currently matching your filters, so you can work down a set without going back. Stepping starts the next track playing from bar 1.

That row also shows the track's feel, form and style — the things worth knowing while you play. Key, tempo and time signature aren't repeated there because the player above already shows them, and the drone is reached from the same Track / Drone switch you use in Librarian mode.

Selecting vs playing

Clicking a track and playing it are deliberately separate:

• Single click — select. Loads the track and draws it, and plays nothing. You can read its details, check its chart, set a loop, or just move on without ever hearing a sound. If a drone is sounding it keeps sounding, and retunes to whatever you clicked.
• Double click — play from bar 1. Starts the track at the first bar, skipping the count-in or intro so you hear the actual groove rather than waiting through dead air. Intros in this library run from 3 to 30 seconds, so this usually is the difference between hearing a track and waiting for one.
• The ▶ / ⏸ on the playing row is a button. Click it to pause or resume without losing your place.

Tracks whose bar 1 hasn't been confirmed yet start at 0:00 — you'll hear their intro. That's a charting gap, not a setting.

Songs with several mixes

Some courses ship one performance as several mixes of the same recording — a Bass and Drums mix to play the whole part over, a Rhythm Guitar mix to solo over, and the full mix with the Solo. The library lists each such song once, and the row shows which mix it will open on (El Camino · Rhythm Guitar).

When one is loaded, a mix button sits in the top-left corner of the waveform — in Librarian and Player mode alike — naming the mix that is playing. Click it for the list of mixes, each with what it contains (bass & drums · rhythm guitar), and pick another. A song with only one mix shows no button:

• The music carries on from the same spot, playing if it was playing.
• Nothing else moves. Your loop points, zoom, practice tempo, click and the chart all belong to the song, not the mix, so switching from the full mix to Bass and Drums keeps you on the bar you were working.
• The waveform redraws for the new mix, and its level is matched like any track's.

Importing a song with several mixes. Drop all the mixes together. When their names differ only by a part — Bass and Drums, Rhythm Guitar, Solo, No Keys — the import table suggests they are one song, and Keep as one song puts the song's key, tempo, family, start and chart on one row, with each mix beneath it keeping its own title, feel and style. The chart goes on once, for every mix; the same PDF dropped beside another mix is not sent twice. Split, in the song row’s Status column, uploads them as separate tracks instead. After the upload the mixes are grouped; if that is refused — mixes of different lengths, say — the song row says why, and Group again retries once it is fixed.

A song reopens on the mix you used last; the first time, on the full mix. Editing a song's key, tempo, meter or credits changes every mix of it — the edit form says so — while each mix keeps its own title and tags. Open in NeckWise hands over the mix you have selected.

Playing & navigating

• The play button starts and pauses; restart beside it jumps back to the start. (Both are icons rather than lettered buttons — hover any control in the player bar for its name.)
• The two 5s buttons nudge backwards and forwards — handy for catching the top of a phrase you just missed.
• Click anywhere on the waveform to jump straight there.
• Volume is the speaker in the player bar. Click it and a fader drops down; the icon shows the level at a glance and turns to a crossed speaker at zero. It also carries the Click level beside it (Metronome in Drone mode), so you can balance the two against each other.

Everything in the player bar that would otherwise be a permanent slider — tempo, zoom, the two levels — opens on click instead. The rule is simple: things you set once tuck away, and things you adjust while playing stay out.

A track becomes playable well before its waveform is drawn, so you can hit play immediately and the waveform will fill in behind you. Tracks you've opened before draw instantly.

On a charted track the waveform opens zoomed in. That sharper view comes from a small file the server prepares for every recording, so it appears almost as soon as the track does — even for a 100 MB WAV. Only if that file is not available does the app read the whole recording instead; then a thin line along the foot of the waveform fills in and a small label says Loading detail · 42%, then Preparing detail…. The overview is there the whole time and the track plays normally; the label goes away when the detail lands.

No sound?

If a track plays — the time moves — but you hear nothing, first look at Safari’s address bar: a crossed-out speaker there means the tab itself is muted, and clicking it is the whole fix. Otherwise send Feedback while the sound is gone, before closing the tab — the report carries what the page’s audio was doing at that moment.

Safari now plays everything through its media player. The first reports located the fault: in its failing state Safari’s audio engine produced nothing at its usual sample rate, while its media player still played. Since version 237 the track, the click and the drone all reach the speakers through the media player in Safari, which is the route that kept working. Chrome is unchanged.

Practice tempo

Every track plays at the same level. The library holds everything from quiet jazz backings to loops recorded straight off a looper pedal, and they arrive 30 dB apart. The player brings each one to a common level as it plays — the Levels speaker shows what it did (level: +25.2 dB, say). Nothing is written to the file; a very quiet track is only brought up as far as its peaks allow, so nothing ever clips.

Where a track's real tempo is known, the player bar shows the tempo as a button — 82 bpm. It is about speed, and nothing else. Click it to drag the slider, type an exact BPM, tap it out on Tap, or ↺ original back to the recording's own tempo. The number stays on the bar the whole time, and it turns blue whenever you are not at the original tempo, so you can never be practising at the wrong speed without seeing it. Anything about the click — its accent, and in Drone mode its meter — lives under the Click button instead (Metronome in Drone mode).

The pitch never changes. Slowing a track down doesn't drop its key, so you can work something out at half speed and still play along in the same position.

Zoom & pan

The magnifier in the player bar zooms into the waveform — click it for the slider. Zoomed in, chord labels spread out and become properly readable, and loop points get much easier to place accurately.

A minimap appears under the waveform showing the whole track with your current view highlighted:

• While playing, the view follows along, moving forward a page at a time as the playhead reaches the edge.
• While paused, drag the minimap to move around the track — useful for reading ahead or checking an earlier section without losing your place.

Looping a section

Two ways to set a loop:

• At the playhead — play up to where you want the loop to start, hit In, then Out at the end.
• By sweeping — drag across the waveform to mark the region directly. Drag either edge afterwards to adjust it.

Loop turns looping on and off. Turning it off never clears your points — the region dims but stays, so you can drop out of a loop, hear the section in context, and switch straight back to it. To clear the loop entirely, use the × on the region readout, which only appears while there is a loop to clear. Loop points are remembered per track.

Each track keeps its own loop — one per track, not one for the app. Come back to a track and its region reappears exactly where you left it, along with whether Loop was switched on. Setting a new one replaces that track's previous loop.

Because it's saved against your account, a loop you set on one machine is there on the next. Turn on the Loop column to see at a glance which tracks have one.

Snapping

On tracks where the beat has been mapped, loop points snap to musical boundaries so your loop actually starts on a downbeat:

Hold Shift while setting or dragging a point to bypass snapping and place it exactly where you want.

The drone

A drone is a sustained chord the app generates itself — no recording, no backing band. Pick Drone in the player's title row and press ▶. Its controls take the waveform's place, so nothing else on the page shifts.

It's for the practice a backing track can't help with: hearing a key with nothing else in the way, modal playing, ear training, or just having a stable harmonic floor to improvise against for as long as you like. It never ends and never changes unless you change it.

It follows the track you're looking at

Switching to the drone stops the track, so the usual reason to do it is that you want to keep a track's harmony and drop the recording. It therefore starts in that track's key and quality — leave Am Funky Blues and the drone comes up as Am7; leave BB 8-bar with a Bridge in G and it comes up as G7. Stop the track, and carry on in the same key with nothing but the drone under you.

It carries on doing that while you browse. With the drone sounding, single-clicking any track retunes it to that track's key and quality — so you can walk down the library hearing each one's tonality without loading a single recording. Change the key or quality by hand at any point and it stays where you put it until you click another track.

• If the track doesn't declare a quality, you get root and fifth rather than a guess. A drone that asserted a major third the recording contradicts would be worse than one that stays out of the argument.
• If the track has no key at all, the drone is left exactly as you last set it.
• Nothing is locked — change the key or quality afterwards whenever you like. This is a starting point, not a constraint.

This works the same in Librarian and Player mode; the source switcher is in the sidebar in one and on the track row in the other.

Key & quality

Choose a key and a quality, and you hear exactly the notes of that chord. Key A with quality Min7 sounds A, C, E and G — the four notes of an Am7. The Sounding readout, beside the keys, always spells out what's actually playing, as a chord symbol.

• 5 is root and fifth only — no third, so it commits to neither major nor minor. This is the one to reach for when you want to play freely over a key without the drone deciding the tonality for you.
• The rest are named the same way NeckWise names them, so the two apps read alike: Dom7, Min7, Maj7, m7b5, 7b5, Dim7, Maj, Min, Dim, Aug, Sus2, Sus4, Maj6, Min6 — fifteen with 5, covering every quality a track in the library can declare. The buttons name the category; the Sounding line and the title use the ordinary chord symbol, so Min7 in key A reads back as Am7.
• The two sus qualities and 5 are the ones with no third at all, so they leave the major/minor question open for you to answer with your own playing.

Change the key or quality while it's sounding and it slides straight across — no gap, no clicking, so you can move it around while you play.

Register & level

• low / mid / high moves the whole drone an octave down or up. Low gives you a proper bass pedal; high keeps it out of the way of a low guitar part.
• Voice chooses the drone's sound: Synth pad (TrackWise's original, and still the default), String pad, Bowed, Organ or Harmonium — the same five voices NeckWise's drone offers. Changing it while the drone sounds crossfades to the new voice; the chorus below works on every voice.
• The speaker in the player bar sets its level, and it's remembered. In Drone mode its first fader reads Drone instead of Track: it is one level shared by both, so switching source never changes how loud things are. The drone panel has no level of its own.

The metronome

In Drone mode the tempo button in the player bar — in the same place the track's tempo sits — shows the metronome's tempo, 100, and opens the same metronome control NeckWise uses: the tempo with − and + (4 BPM a step, 40–300) and Tap (tap in tempo; it lands on the nearest 4), then Meter and Accent.

Meter sets how many beats make a bar — 2, 3, 4, 5 or 7, or — for beats with no bar — or a compound 6/8 or 12/8. In those, the tempo counts the dotted-quarter beat (two to a 6/8 bar, four to a 12/8 bar), and the click plays all three eighths of each beat, the first louder, so it feels like the meter rather than like 2/4. Accent is what turns a pulse into structure: Beat 1 accents each downbeat, Backbeat accents 2 and 4 (the last beat in other meters), and None gives a bare pulse with no implied downbeat, which is what you want for free-time practice. Click anywhere else to close it.

Play starts and stops both. Metronome in the player bar chooses whether it sounds while the drone plays; press play and the drone and its metronome start together, press it again and both stop. Nothing clicks while the drone is stopped.

It also arrives at the tempo of the track you were last looking at, the same way the drone arrives in that track's key — so browsing the library walks you through its tempos as well as its keys.

In Drone mode, the Metronome button in the player bar is its on/off — the tempo menu has no switch of its own, just as a backing track keeps its Click in the player bar — and the Metronome fader beside the level sets how loud it is. On a backing track the metronome is a different thing: it rides the recording's own measured beat grid and can't be retimed, so it only exists on tracks whose timing has been confirmed. The Metronome is a tempo you set, and it works with nothing loaded at all.

Follow the chart — slow a study down

Select a track that has a chart, switch to Drone, and leave Chart on Follow (it is on unless you turn it off). Press play: one bar of count-in clicks while a large number counts down over the lead sheet (the player bar stays at 0:00), with the chord the chart starts on sounding under the count, then the drone steps through the chart's chords, on the beat, at the metronome's tempo — the tempo button's number, which you can set as slow as you like and change while it plays. A track whose chart has a played intro with its own chords (El Camino's four-bar vamp, played twice) plays that intro once first, the lead sheet following the intro's bars, and then the form. The player bar shows which bar you are in. It loops the form until you stop it.

• The lead sheet follows along — the cursor, the bar highlight and the status line move at the drone's tempo, and the player bar shows which bar you are in.
• Click a bar to go there. While it plays, the bar you click comes in on the next beat, its chord sounding fresh, and you stay on the same time through the form. Stopped, clicking a bar marks it (the status line says Play starts here): press play and it counts in one bar and comes in on that bar — handy for working one section over and over. Stopping keeps your place: press play again and it counts in to the bar you stopped in. The restart button (⏮, left of the 5s buttons) takes you back to the beginning of the chart — the intro, when the drone plays one — straight away if it is playing, or ready for the next Play if it is stopped. In a folded chart, a bar that repeats takes you to its next time through. (In Track mode the lead sheet doesn't take clicks — use the waveform to move through a recording.)
• The click is optional. Turn Metronome on to hear the bars as well; it accents each downbeat by the chart's own bars, so a bar of 2/4 gets its downbeat.
• Chords sound as their basic shape, as the drone always has: an Em9 drones as Em7, a Gmaj13 as Gmaj7. Voice, octave and chorus all still apply.
• Turn Follow off for a single held chord instead. Without a chart, the switch is greyed and the drone holds one chord as before.

Where the drone starts. Switching to the drone from a charted track now lands on the chart's home chord — Beginner Blues on A7, Jack 1 on Am — where it used to give a bare root and fifth whenever the track's quality was unset. A track with no chart still gets root and fifth.

Modulation — the chorus

Each note of the drone is built from two voices tuned a hair apart. That’s what gives it a slow pulse instead of sounding like a dead sine wave. Chorus adds movement on top of that: a short modulated delay mixed against the dry signal — the classic pedal/synth ensemble effect.

The button is simply on or off. On, Depth sets how far the effect moves and Speed how fast; off, the drone is dead steady and those two faders grey out. Both are deliberately limited at each end to values that stay musical — you can’t dial in a seasick warble. The readout beside them shows what you’ve actually got, in real units.

The click

On beat-synced tracks, a Click button appears in the player bar; its level sits beside the track's own in the speaker's fader panel, so you can balance the two. It rides the track's real measured beat grid — not a generic click at the nominal tempo — so it stays locked to the recording through tempo changes, seeks, and loops. Where the bar position is known, the downbeat is accented. It stays on when you change tracks, so you can check timing across a run of tracks without re-enabling it each time — the button always shows whether it is actually running.

Tracks without a mapped beat grid don't show the button at all, rather than offering a click that would drift. In Drone mode the button is always there, because it switches the drone's metronome instead.

The click's Accent is under the Click button itself — its face shows the track's meter (12/8 ▾), and clicking it opens the settings. Beat 1 accents each downbeat, Backbeat accents 2 and 4 (the last beat in other meters), and None clicks every beat the same. On a recording the meter is shown rather than set — the track decides it; in Drone mode you choose it, so the meter joins the accent in the same menu. Your accent is remembered from track to track.

The player bar's menus behave like the Help panels: only one is open at a time. Opening the tempo menu closes the metronome's, and vice versa — including the column filters over in the track list. Close one with Esc, a click anywhere outside it, or by pressing the same button again; clicking inside a menu never closes it, so you can change several settings in one visit.

Nothing in the player bar moves when you switch between Track and Drone. Controls that only mean something against a recording — the skip buttons, the time, zoom and the loop — stay where they are, greyed out, while the drone is the source; the tempo button changes what it shows, not where it is.

Where the click stops

Recordings don't end on a tidy beat. They fade out, or stop dead, or land on a crash that rings for several seconds after the band has finished. The beat grid, though, runs all the way to the end of the file — so the click used to keep counting straight through the fade, and the chord bar kept stepping through bars nobody was playing.

Both now stop when the music stops. The click falls silent and the chord highlighting stops advancing at the end of the performance rather than the end of the audio file.

There are two ways the app can know where that is:

• Marked. Somebody has listened to the track and marked the exact beat the band finishes on. That beat is used exactly as marked — no padding, no rounding.
• Estimated. Otherwise the app works it out from the recording's own loudness, looking for where the band drops away. It deliberately stops at the hard stop rather than following a crash cymbal or a held chord down through its decay — so a track that ends on a big hit stops on the hit, not somewhere in the ring-out.

Most tracks are estimated at the moment; marked ones are being added over time, and a marked ending is always the more accurate of the two.

Charts & chords

The chart can also say how the music ends. A marked ending carries a type — fade out, stop, ritard, or hold — and the lead sheet marks the bar where it happens: fade out with a diminuendo hairpin under the bar; Fine with a final barline at the bar where the music stops; rit. for a slowing ending; a fermata over a held last chord. When a song stops, holds or slows to a stop the only time through its form, the chart simply ends on that bar with a final barline — no bars after it and no repeat sign, because nothing after it is ever played. That is notation only, on purpose. The click and the chord highlighting still stop where the music stops, and nothing about the type changes their timing — on a fade the band is still playing in time, and a click that stopped early would be wrong.

What the icons mean

The Rights column shows against anything private and stays empty for public tracks, so a glance down it tells you what's yours alone. Its header sorts private tracks to the top and filters like any other.

These icons appear in the Chart column, and every icon the list uses — these three plus the padlock — is spelled out in a legend at the bottom of the sidebar, so you never have to remember them.

The Chart column tells you how much is known about a track's harmony:

Feel, style and family can be changed after upload. The sidebar’s edit form carries the same three menus the import page has; feel and style go on the track, the family on its progression — and when that progression is shared with other tracks and already has a family, the form says so and leaves it to the workbench.

The intro is engraved as what it is. A played intro is drawn as its own bars before the form — its own chords when the notation file or PDF supplied them, folded between its own repeat signs when the print says it repeats (a 4-bar vamp played twice, or ×4), otherwise as N.C. for the length given at import — and the form’s repeat sign opens after it. A count-in or a drums-only lead-in is not engraved: nothing is drawn, and the form starts the chart. The cursor follows the intro’s bars while it plays. During the last bar before the chart starts, a large countdown (4 3 2 1) counts you in over the lead sheet, on the recording’s own beats — the same countdown the drone uses when it follows a chart.

Every bar is numbered, in small print just under the staff at the start of the bar, with the same numbers the instructors' PDFs use. (The prints put them above the staff; on the lead sheet that space is taken by the chords, the section letters and the repeat brackets.) The count starts at the first bar the chart draws, so a played intro takes bars 1–4 and the A section starts at 5 — the same numbers as the print. A count-in is not drawn and not counted.

Folded or written out. Charts are kept written out, bar for bar, because that is what the moving cursor follows. When a chart has a repeat in it — the same section played twice or more, or a written-out vamp — a Folded button appears beside Print, and folds it the way a lead sheet would: the shared bars once between repeat signs, each different ending under a numbered bracket (1.2. for endings two passes share), and ×3 on a repeat with no endings to count it. The cursor still follows the music in a folded chart, and what prints is what is showing. Written out puts it back; the choice is remembered.

A chart that nobody has listened through yet — one built from a notation file or a PDF, or typed and not confirmed — shows the page icon with a ? instead of the ✓, and the Status filter has an unverified chip that lists exactly those tracks. They play and follow the music like any other chart; the ✓ is earned in the workbench, under 4 · Verify, by listening a cycle through.

No icons just means nobody has charted that track yet. It's still fully playable, loopable, and exportable — charting is a bonus, not a requirement.

Progression, chart, key — three different things

These words get used loosely everywhere else, so it's worth being exact about what TrackWise means by each. It explains a lot of what you'll see.

Two real examples from the library, both sharing one progression and differing only in the last bar:

Same changes. Different charts. Both correct.

How progressions are named

Progression names describe what the progression is, not which track it came from: 145 Dominant Blues (quick IV), not "Cross The Road". A generic progression belongs to nobody, so it doesn't carry anyone's name — the same twelve-bar shape turns up in hundreds of recordings.

A genuinely distinctive progression does keep its attribution, because there it's a real piece of writing rather than common practice. If you see a composer or instructor in a progression's name, that's deliberate.

Which progressions are listed, and which aren't

Progressions are shared — one entry serves every track that plays it, and the same list feeds NeckWise's progression menu. Most of them are common property: a twelve-bar blues with a quick IV belongs to nobody.

Some aren't listed publicly, and it isn't the chords that decide it — it's the name. A progression worked out for one particular recording usually gets named after it. "145 Dominant Blues (quick IV)" tells you nothing you couldn't hear in a hundred records; "Raising Sand" tells you what's inside a course somebody paid for. So a progression stays off the public list when it was made for a track that isn't public, and nothing public uses it.

Nothing here restricts the chords themselves. A chord sequence with no rhythm and no melody is the common vocabulary of the music, and we don't claim otherwise — the IP protection page says so plainly. What's protected is the recording, its chart, and — because a name can give away a purchase — sometimes the label on a bespoke progression.

Sharps, flats, and why the same chord changes name

A chord can be spelled two ways that sound identical — G♯ and A♭ are the same note. Which one is correct depends on the key, not on the note. TrackWise follows the same rule notation does: every letter A–G is used exactly once in a key. In E major the third degree is G♯, because A♭ would use A twice and skip G entirely.

Even then it follows the original. A progression records each chord as a degree — "the flat second", "the sharp fourth" — and the flat or sharp is part of the degree's name, not decoration. So a ♭II written in G comes out as B♭ in A, not A♯. The two sound the same; only one is what the writer meant.

You don't have to do anything with any of this. It's here because if you compare the same progression on two tracks in different keys, the chord names will look different, and now you know that's correct rather than a bug.

Printing the lead sheet

Where a track came with its own chart as a PDF, Uploaded chart / Lead sheet switches between the two. The uploaded chart is the instructor's own document; the lead sheet is the app's, and only the lead sheet follows the music as it plays. Tracks with no uploaded chart show no switch.

Print / Save PDF sits directly above the chart, at the right — nothing between the button and the thing it prints. It hides the app and lays the chart out cleanly for US Letter paper, so you can print it or save it as a PDF and keep it on your music stand. The chart prints at the same size whatever its length — a long chart runs onto a second page rather than shrinking, and pages break only between lines of music, never through one. Each page carries the title and the footer.

• The saved PDF is named after the track — printing Am Funky Blues gives you Am Funky Blues.pdf, not the app's name.
• The publisher credit sits under the last stave, and the Meatpacking Music and McErlain marks sit at the foot of the page — not wherever the music happens to end.
• It fits on one page. A chart longer than the paper is scaled down to fit rather than pushing the logos onto a second sheet.

Publisher & year

A track can carry a publisher and a year — a separate fact from the instructor who plays on it. “Jeff McErlain” is the instructor; “McErlain Music” is the publisher.

When a track has one, the chart shows the copyright beneath it — © 2022 McErlain Music — in the same hand as the composer name, on screen and on paper. A track with no publisher simply shows nothing in the app, and a printed copy falls back to a Meatpacking Music line so a chart never leaves the printer without a credit.

Set them in the sidebar under Selected track on your own tracks, or for a whole batch at once when you import.

The structure bar

The strip above the waveform is the timeline, and its upper row is structure — the shape of the recording, one band per part. It shows the intro or count-in before the music proper starts, then a band for every section of the form, shaded so that repeats of the same section share a shade and a different one stands out. A heavier line and a number mark each time the form comes round again, so you can see at a glance that you're in the third pass of four. The whole track's structure also appears as tick marks on the minimap below the waveform, which is where a long form reads best.

It's the quickest way to see how long the form is, to find where the solo section starts, and to drop a loop cleanly on a chorus boundary. The band you're currently in is highlighted as the track plays.

It works before there are any chords. A track's structure is knowable long before anyone has typed its progression, so a track with no chart yet still gets a timeline here rather than an empty strip.

The chord bar

The timeline's lower row shows, on beat-synced tracks, the chord symbols laid out at their real positions in the recording. The chord currently sounding is highlighted as it plays, so you can see what's coming without reading notation.

It is divided one block per bar, so the bars visibly go past even when the chord doesn't change — a one-chord vamp still reads as a bar count rather than one undivided stripe, and the highlight steps forward bar by bar. A chord that changes partway through a bar splits inside it.

On a long track a label is left out rather than squeezed when its bar is too narrow to hold it — so you never get half a chord symbol or two names on top of each other. Zoom in and they reappear as the bars widen.

The highlight stops advancing when the band stops, rather than carrying on through a fade or a ring-out — see Where the click stops.

Keeping the highlight with the sound

Both the chord bar and the lead sheet highlight what is sounding, and that is a slightly different thing from what the app has decoded. Every computer takes a moment to get audio from the browser out to the speakers, so if the highlight simply followed the playhead it would run ahead of what you hear. The app asks the browser how big that delay is and aims the highlight at your ears rather than at the playhead.

Safari needed more than it reports. It under-states the delay by roughly a tenth of a second, so on Safari the chords and the chart cursor ran noticeably ahead of the music — a bar could light up before you heard it. Rather than guess, we measured the real figure directly, on more than one machine and more than one set of speakers: the shortfall came out the same ~90 ms each time, which told us it is a property of Safari itself rather than of anybody's audio hardware. Safari now gets that correction added; Chrome reports itself accurately and is left alone. The click was never affected — it is generated inside the same audio path as the music, so any delay applies to both equally and cancels out.

Sizing the list against the chart

The gap between the track list and the chart is a handle — it stays invisible until you move over it, then a grip appears and the cursor changes. It sets where one ends and the other begins. Drag it, or focus it and use ↑ / ↓ (hold Shift for bigger steps). Double-click it to go back to the default.

Dragging towards the list stops once the list is down to a single row — the search box, the column headers and one track. The chart can take everything else, but the list never disappears out from under you, and on a short window that stop arrives sooner because it is measured in rows, not in a percentage.

Your split is remembered, it follows you across browsers with the rest of your settings, and a saved view carries its own split — so a view built for reading charts can open with the chart large, and a browsing view can open with the list large. Views saved before this existed leave your current split alone rather than resetting it.

The lead sheet

Below the track list, tracks with confirmed bar timings show a lead sheet — real bar-by-bar notation with the chord symbols above each bar.

Two words, two things. The lead sheet is the one TrackWise draws, and it follows the music. A chart is the document an instructor may upload beside a track, usually a PDF, which shows exactly what they wrote and does not move. Where a track has both, the switch above the sheet flips between them.

On fully synced tracks it plays along: a cursor tracks the beat, the current bar highlights, and a countdown warns you when the next chord is coming ("D9 in 2 beats"). During an intro, before the form actually starts, the cursor stays hidden rather than guessing.

It also tells you which time round you are. Most backing tracks play the same form over and over, so bar 3 looks identical on every pass. The status line under the chart names the repetition — "bar 3 / 32 · C · pass 2 of 3" — so you always know where you are in the whole recording, not just within the form.

When a recording ends partway through the form, the last pass is marked partial in red. That is the app being straight with you: the chart is one cycle of the form and it assumes the band keeps repeating it, which is true almost all of the time — but on that final incomplete pass it is continuing a pattern rather than reporting one. Nearly every track ends this way, usually with a bar or two to go.

Some tracks are a song, not an endless chorus. When a chart says how many times its form plays, the closing repeat sign carries the count (×3), the words above it say how each pass is played (1.2. Melody · 3. Rhythm), and a final barline follows — the chart ends there instead of implying another time round. The status line names the pass the same way (pass 3 of 3 · Rhythm), and anything the recording plays past the last pass is marked past the last.

The chart scrolls itself to keep up. A long form doesn't fit the pane — in Librarian mode especially — so when the cursor reaches a line that isn't showing, the chart moves that line up near the top, leaving the bars ahead of you in view. It only moves when it has to, so it sits still for most of a line rather than creeping. Scroll it yourself and it backs off for five seconds and lets you read where you like, then picks the cursor up again.

A form can change meter. Where a chart holds a bar in another time signature (Little Wing's one bar of 2/4), the lead sheet prints the new signature on that bar and the old one again where it returns, the cursor crosses the short bar at the music's pace, and the click accents its downbeat.

If the progression is known but the bar-by-bar timing hasn't been confirmed, you get an honest list of the chord symbols instead of an invented bar layout.

Want a chart that isn't there?

On any chartless track, Request a chart in its detail pane sends the request through with that exact track attached, so there's no ambiguity about which one you meant.

Loading a looper

Tracks go one place from here: onto a looper pedal. TrackWise isn't a file converter, and it doesn't hand tracks back out as downloads.

Loading a pedal

⬇ Export in the title row opens the playlist view: choose tracks, put them in the order you want to reach them, and send them across. Both the import and export pages carry a Help button in the header that opens a short Quick Start for that page.

A BOSS RC-5 must also be powered on and connected and BOSS Tone Studio launched before the drive appears at all — that's the pedal's own behaviour, not TrackWise's.

Building the playlist

• The picker is the same table as the library, with the same column filters — so “every track by one instructor” is one filter and Add all shown. Tick individual rows to add a subset.
• Added tracks leave the picker, so what's left is always what you haven't used yet.
• Drag the ⠿ handle to reorder. Position is the memory slot, so the order here is the order on the pedal.
• Fill chooses how slots are handed out. Overwrite from 1 renumbers the whole playlist from slot 001. Fill gaps, then append keeps what's on the pedal and puts new tracks in any free slot below the end first, only carrying on past the last one when the gaps run out — so if you erase slots 10–15 and then add nine tracks, six land in 10–15 and three go on the end. The playlist names the slots it's about to reuse.
• Fill gaps, then append also recognises tracks the playlist has already put on this pedal — they keep the slot they're in, aren't copied again, and don't count toward the slot limit. So a playlist you've already written can have a few tracks added without re-sending the lot.
• To reuse slots, erase first, then add. Clearing happens on the pedal straight away and the free slots appear in the playlist as soon as it finishes — the two are separate steps on purpose, so you can see the result of the first before committing the second.
• A playlist keeps whatever you put in it, including after you've written it — nothing is cleared automatically. That's deliberate, so you can re-send or reprint the same set, but it means a playlist from a previous session is still there when you come back. The line under the table always reads how it breaks down: 74 in the playlist · 65 already on the pedal · 9 to write.
• On LCD is what the pedal's little screen will show. It wraps after about six characters, so TrackWise suggests a squeezed form (Slow Blues → SlwBls); type your own if you'd rather. If two slots would read the same, the field turns gold.

Sending, and clearing

• Transfer sits in the Looper card at the top of the page, beside the connection it writes through, and is greyed until the playlist has something in it.
• Every write is read back and compared byte for byte, and written again if the pedal returned anything different; a track that will not verify after three tries is removed and reported, with a Write again button. But the RC-5's storage damages a word or two per file as it flushes to the card on eject, after that check can see it — so the real proof comes afterwards: eject, power-cycle, reconnect, and press Check files. It reads everything on the looper, names any slot carrying damaged samples, and offers Rewrite the damaged. About one file in six fails a pass; two or three rounds leave the card clean.
• If Rescan seems to do nothing after a power-cycle, the page has lost the pedal — it says so and asks you to Connect again.
• The tempo on the pedal's screen is the track's own, to within a few tenths. The RC-5 plays a memory as a number of measures at a tempo and stretches the audio to fit, so TrackWise writes the measure count that matches the track's real length and fits the tempo to it exactly — 82.0 for an 82 bpm track. A track with no tempo in the library gets a count at the pedal's default 120, which also plays clean; the number is only a label until you use the pedal's rhythm.
• Every memory is written from blank. The pedal plays a memory as a number of measures at a tempo and stretches the audio to fit, and it remembers the count from whatever the slot held before — so TrackWise now resets a memory to the pedal's own empty state before writing into it, and when you erase a slot. If tracks on the pedal ever sound watery or play at the wrong speed, erase them and write again. To reload the whole pedal cleanly: tick everything under On the looper and Erase, eject and power-cycle, connect again, write with Overwrite from 1, power-cycle, then Check files.
• Write to pedal converts each track to the pedal's own format and writes it, then sets the name and tempo for each memory. Tracks already on the pedal unchanged are left alone rather than rewritten.
• Download .zip is the fallback that works in any browser: one archive of slot-numbered WAVs plus a PLACEMENT.txt telling you which folder each goes in. Drag them across in Finder.
• On the looper lists what's currently on the device. Tick slots and Erase to free them — useful when you want to keep some tracks and replace the rest.
• Save… keeps the playlist by name so you can recall it; Print / Save PDF produces a slot-by-slot sheet to keep by the pedal.
• If something looks wrong after a write, you can put the pedal back. TrackWise saves the looper's previous settings to this browser before it changes anything, and offers Restore them in the note that follows. It is there for the case where the pedal comes back looking unfamiliar — names or tempos not what you expected.

A track with no known tempo is written with the pedal's default tempo (120) on both of the memory's tempo tags, so the pedal has no reason to stretch it; the number itself does nothing until you use the pedal's tempo features.

Tracks already on the pedal from before this existed were written at full level. To re-level them, choose Overwrite from 1 (or erase the slots first) — Fill gaps, then append recognises them as already there and leaves them alone.

Opening in NeckWise

The NeckWise mark sits above the chart, on the right. What it hands over depends on what the track carries:

• One lesson built on the track — the mark opens that lesson: its whole saved board setup, with the track loaded. This is the common case for course material.
• Several lessons — the mark opens a short list; pick the lesson you mean.
• No lesson — the mark hands over the track and its chart, and NeckWise sets the fretboard up from them: the track's key and its progression where there is one, or its key and a one-chord vamp on its tonality where there isn't, or just the key when that's all anyone knows. It doesn't guess — a track that carries too little gets an honest partial setup rather than an invented one.

NeckWise opens in one window. The first time, you get a new NeckWise window; after that, every NeckWise mark reuses it rather than opening another. The one exception is a NeckWise you opened some other way, such as from a bookmark: the browser gives TrackWise no way to find that window, so the mark opens its own.

Either way it opens loaded but not playing. The lesson rows under the instructor line are a different door: the title opens the lesson on the instructor's own site, and the YouTube mark opens its video.

Where the track came from

When a track comes from a lesson, the space above the chart says so. The first line names the instructor, then the course it belongs to. Beneath that sits one row per lesson: the lesson's title, which opens it on the instructor's own site, and a video mark where there's a video to watch.

Each lesson gets its own row rather than one shared link. A few tracks back two different lessons — one on the chords, say, and one on soloing over them — and only you know which you meant. Giving them a row each lets you say.

Tracks that don't come from a lesson show none of this — no instructor line, no rows, no empty space where they would have been. The NeckWise mark is there either way, at the right of that top line.

One sign-in covers both apps.

…and coming back the other way

NeckWise has the matching button. It sits beside the name of whatever track NeckWise has loaded, and reads Open in Player ↗ — it opens TrackWise with that track already selected, in the TrackWise window if NeckWise opened one before, ready to play but not playing. On a narrow window it shrinks to just the arrow. With no track loaded, you simply land on the library.

It opens in Player mode — full-size chart, list collapsed to one row — because a link naming one track means you've already chosen. If you'd rather browse, the Librarian toggle is where it always is, and clicking it makes that stick.

The link points at a specific track only once. Reload the page afterwards and you get whatever you were last listening to, and whichever mode you normally use — a link never quietly changes your preference.

Linking to a track yourself

You can write one of these links by hand. Add ?track= and the track's name to the app's address:

https://trackwise.meatpackingmusic.com/?track=Am Funky Blues

Punctuation and capitals don't matter — am-funky-blues and AM FUNKY BLUES find the same track. The name has to be the whole title, though. Robben's Daughter won't open Robben's Daughter in G: rather than guess between near-matches and risk opening the wrong thing, the app tells you it couldn't find it and leaves you in the library to search.

Both buttons are reachable from the keyboard — tab to one and it shows a focus ring before you press it.

Your own tracks

Tracks you've added are yours to correct at any time. Nothing you enter is final, and nothing has to be complete.

Select the track, and its details appear in the sidebar under Selected track. Two buttons sit underneath:

• ✎ Edit details — change the title, key, tempo, time signature, instructor, course, source, publisher or year. Leave anything blank you don't know; blank is easy to find and fill in later, whereas a wrong value looks correct forever.
• Delete — removes the track and its audio file. It asks first, and it can't be undone.

Adding tracks

⬆ Import in the title row opens the import view. Drop audio files onto it or use Choose files… — MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC and OGG all work.

• Uploads are private to your account. They never appear in the shared library. Someone else sees one only if you share it with them by name.
• Nothing is required except a name. Anything TrackWise can read off the filename — title, key — is filled in for you and is fully editable. Blank is genuinely fine: blank is easy to find and fill in later, whereas a wrong value looks correct forever.
• A pack usually shares an instructor, a course and a source. Set those once in the bar above the table, tick the rows they apply to, and hit Apply to selected. If part of the batch differs, tick just those rows and apply again — the table always shows what each track will carry.
• Each row takes a ＋ chart document, described below.
• If a row fails, it says why and offers Retry for that row alone, or Remove to drop it. The rest of the batch is unaffected.
• You can also import straight off a looper pedal — connect it, pick the memories you want, and they join the same list. Rescan re-reads the device.

Attaching a chart

When you import, each row has a Chart column with a ＋ chart button. Attach a PDF of the chart for that track. It's optional, and it can be added later just as easily.

Everything starts at the drop zone: its Choose files… takes a whole course folder — audio, chart PDFs and notation files together, each chart or notation file attaching to the audio whose filename matches its own — and Read a looper… reads a mounted pedal; or drop files anywhere. On a row, ＋ chart takes a PDF and ＋ notation takes a Guitar Pro or MusicXML file, several at once, so a track can carry both. Each is one button: once a file is picked, that button reads Remove chart or Remove notation until the row is sent; after that the row shows ✓ chart with the file’s name, and a wrong file is replaced by attaching the right one in the track’s edit form in the library.

What a pack shares goes in the bar; what differs goes on the row. The bar above the table holds Instructor, Course, Source and Publisher: tick the rows they apply to and Apply to selected writes them, and a muted line under each title shows what that row will carry. Each row then has its own Feel, Style and Family menus, drawn from the library’s shared vocabulary, and a Before bar 1 pair — what precedes the form (a count-in, drums only, a played intro, a pickup, or nothing) and how long it lasts, down to half a bar for a two-beat drum pickup. When the notation file or PDF marks its own intro, the file’s length is used for a played intro. Feel and style go on the track; the family belongs to the progression, so it is applied to the chart built from the notation file or PDF (or to a reused progression that has no family yet).

Say what happens before bar 1. Two fixed-choice menus in the same bar, Before bar 1 (count-in, played intro, pickup, or nothing) and Bars (its length), describe the start of the recording; the row’s Start cell shows the choice. With them, bar 1 is arithmetic on the beat grid: one count-in after the first click, or one intro after the band comes in. The detector then only confirms that beat against the chords rather than searching for it, and the row says how the two agreed. Leave them blank and the detector searches on its own.

A notation file can go alongside it. The ＋ notation button takes a Guitar Pro file (.gp, .gpx, .gp5, .gp4, .gp3) or a MusicXML file (.mxl, .musicxml), and a track can carry both a chart document and a notation file at once. If you drop them into the import area together with the audio, a chart or notation file whose filename matches a track's attaches to it by itself. A notation file builds the track’s chart for you. When it arrives, the server reads it, finds the repeating chorus in a written-out performance (an etude with three choruses becomes one 12-bar form), and writes the chart: the progression, the chord durations, meter, key, and a beat grid from the detection that ran at import. The row says what was built — chart built: 12-bar form × 3 · F 4/4 — or why it wasn’t. The chart shows in the library at once and follows the music; it is marked unverified until someone has listened through it. Where bar 1 falls in the recording is taken from what you said about the start if you said it, and otherwise worked out from the audio — first where the band comes in after any count-in, then which beat lines the chart’s chords up with the bass — and the import row says how sure that was. A low-confidence start, or a recording with an intro the chart doesn’t contain, is corrected in the workbench. The file itself can't be downloaded, and it's shown nowhere but the track's edit form. There's no separate remove for one either: upload the right file over a wrong one, and deleting a track removes its chart and its notation file together.

A chart PDF can build the chart too. Most charts arrive as a PDF rather than a notation file, and a PDF made by Guitar Pro, MuseScore or Sibelius (rather than scanned) carries its chord symbols and barlines as text and drawing, which the server reads the same way it reads a notation file: the chords on their bars, the repeating chorus in a written-out performance, sections such as A Melody where the print names them, and repeat signs with first and second endings unfolded into the played order. The row under the PDF says what was built, exactly as it does under a notation file. Two kinds of file are rejected outright as a chart source, and the row says which: a scanned or photographed PDF, which has no text to read (it is still kept as the picture of the chart, but nothing is built from it), and a locked Guitar Pro file, whose notation is encrypted — ask the instructor for an unlocked file or a MusicXML export. Two more limits are worth knowing. A repeat sign does not say how many times — a print never carries the count — so a repeated passage is played twice unless the chart writes out more. And a page holding several titled charts at once is refused rather than read as one chart; a chart cropped out of such a page reads fine, because only what the page shows is read. When a track has both, the notation file is read and the PDF is kept as the picture to look at.

The chart is shown only where there isn't a lead sheet. A chart built in the workbench follows the music, bar by bar, as it plays; an attached document can't, so it never replaces one. It fills the gap until the lead sheet exists, and steps aside once it does.

A chart carries exactly the same permissions as its track. If the track is private, so is the chart — it's served through the same check, not merely left off a list.

Charts only, deliberately: not scale or chord diagrams, which the fretboard draws live and better, and not written notes, which belong in a lesson.

A track's title doesn't need to repeat its instructor or publisher — both are fields of their own and both already print on the chart, so Slow Blues in G reads better than Slow Blues in G (Some Instructor).

Charts, beat grids and chord symbols aren't edited here — those come from a separate process. If a track of yours needs one, use Request a chart in its detail pane.

Your account

Sign in and Create account are both in the header. You can browse the shared library without an account; signing in adds your own tracks alongside it. One account covers TrackWise and NeckWise both — sign in once and each knows you.

Confirming your email

Creating an account sends you a link to click. Until you do, the account won't sign in.

Why we ask. Instructors grant access to their own lessons and backing tracks by email address, so an address has to be provably yours before it can be given anything. That's the only reason we verify. We don't sell, share or rent email addresses, and we won't send you anything else unless you opt in.

If the message doesn't arrive within a minute or two, check your junk folder — a new sender takes a while to become familiar to mail providers. Marking it "not junk" helps, and it's worth doing before you need the next one.

Your views and loops follow your account

Saved views, loop points, and which columns you show and how wide they are are stored against your account, not the browser. Set a loop in Safari and it's there in Chrome; save a view on the laptop and it's on the desktop.

Whatever you changed most recently wins. If you edit the same saved view in two browsers at once, the later edit replaces the earlier one rather than trying to merge them.

Some things stay with the device on purpose, because they describe where you are rather than what you're working on: volume, the click level, zoom, which track is selected, and whether you're in Librarian or Player mode.

Signed out, everything still works and stays in that browser — it simply doesn't travel.

Whose material you can see

Tracks marked are private — material licensed to someone individually rather than for sharing. They never appear in the public library, and the audio itself is refused to anyone not entitled to it, not merely hidden from the list.

You'll see a private track if any of these is true:

• it's yours — you uploaded it;
• it's been shared with you by name. You can play, loop, read the chart and export it for practice; you can't edit or delete it, and you can't pass it on;
• you're the instructor credited on it. Someone who teaches or performs on a track can always reach it, even when the copy in the library belongs to somebody else.
• an instructor has granted your email address access — either to everything they publish, or to a single course. This is how subscriptions and course purchases reach you.

Use the address you buy or subscribe with. A grant is made against an email address, and only a confirmed one counts — so signing up here under a different address than the one your instructor has on file means their material won't find you. The same rule applies to lessons as to tracks.

Getting help

• Help — a quick tour of the main controls, without leaving the page.
• Feedback — report a bug or suggest something. Set up the screen that shows the problem first: your current view (track, filters, loop, playback position) is attached automatically, which is usually enough to reproduce an issue without any back-and-forth.
• Support — what the app costs to run, and the tip jar if it's been useful. Tips go through Venmo or PayPal; where a tip follows time spent on one instructor's material, half of it goes to them.

Each of these opens over the app, not below it. Nothing you had set up moves out of the way, and the panel takes the height of the window rather than a slice of it. Close one with Esc, the ✕, a click anywhere outside it, or by pressing the same button again. Only one is open at a time — opening another closes the first.

Feedback does not ask for your email and does not promise a reply. It goes into a queue a human reads. That is why setting up the screen that shows the problem matters: the attached view is what makes an issue reproducible without any back-and-forth.

Teach, publish or license backing tracks? Information for Instructors ↗ explains how your material gets in, what stays yours, and who can reach it. It's linked from the app's Quick Start panel as well.