How to practise one hard bar: slow it down and loop it
Short answer. Pick the smallest passage that contains the problem — usually one or two bars — set a tempo you can play cleanly, loop it, and raise the tempo in small steps only after several clean repetitions. Speed you cannot play cleanly is speed you are practising wrong.
Open your tab file with Tabline
Isolate less than you think
The instinct is to loop the whole phrase. The problem is almost always narrower: one string change, one stretch, one shift. Loop that, with a beat of lead-in, and you get many more repetitions of the actual difficulty per minute of practice.
Find the tempo where it is clean, not the tempo you want
Drop the tempo until every note sounds — no buzzes, no rushed shift, no note cut short. That tempo is data, not a verdict: it tells you how far the passage is from where you want it. Most people start 30–40% below the target and are surprised how clean the passage is when slow.
Climb in small steps
Raise by about 5% after several clean repetitions in a row, not after one. If a step goes wrong, drop back one and stay there. A speed trainer that ramps automatically does this for you, so your attention stays on the hands rather than on a tempo dial.
Practise the join, not just the hard bar
A bar you can play in isolation still breaks when it arrives at speed from the bar before. Once the hard bar is reliable, move the loop start back one bar so you rehearse the approach into it.
Short sessions beat long ones
Five focused minutes on one loop, twice a day, will beat forty minutes of running the song. The looping does the repetition; your job is to keep it clean and stop before it stops being clean.
Doing it in Tabline
Tap a bar to set A, tap another to set B, and the loop plays between them. The speed trainer takes a starting percentage and steps it up each time the loop comes round. Both live in the practice sheet with the per-track mixer, so you can mute the other instruments while you work.
Loop it on the phone
Tabline's A–B loop and speed trainer are part of the one-time Pro unlock.
