Examples of instrumental songs this may work well with:
Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child
Metallica - Orion (full instrumental)
Fleetwood Mac - Tusk (song, not the entire album)
Songs with incredible guitar riffs, could be thousands of great songs
Led Zeppelin - Whole lotta love, with the heavy bass power-chords
Kenny Rogers & the First Edition - Just Dropped In
Kid Rock - Prodigal Son (depending on the speed, it helps bring out the near constant guitar riffing in what I would consider more “background” sounding, more prominent in the mix
Outkast - E.T.
Pink Floyd - Any color you like (fully instrumental)
Pink Floyd - Us and Them (beautiful trumpets or saxaphone)
Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the devil (slowing down the drum tempo)
Stevie Ray Vaughan - The Sky (can barely tell the lower pitch vocals)
Supertramp - Goodbye Stranger, especially the ending solo
White Zombie - Warp Asylum, already a slow song
Black Sabbath - War Pigs
I know Ryan definitely loves and agrees with this song. The reason I included this is because the beginning tempo is quite a bit slower than the main part. So try matching that original pace, also at the end it speeds up continuously
Eric Clapton - Layla, the extended recording at the end, pure instrumental, works great a very slow speeds
Grateful Dead - due to the usually incredibly high-pitch guitar tuning used, excessively slow speeds, even well below half-speed, such as 44% speed still sound fine. Of course the vocals are nearly indecernible but the music is still enjoyable
Grateful Dead - Casey Jones works well at slower speeds
If you open your favorite youtube channels and change the speed to 0.75, that will sound garbage.
The alternative is to turn off this default effect, and can be done inside the browsers developer tools.
Or, you can install the extension global speed to flip that bit for you.
This extension is one of very few that allow turning off this default effect, usually called time-stretching, but for the web, this feature, standardized by Mozilla is called
.pitchPreserves = true
And there doesn’t seem to be a website in existance that has this set to false.
It works on ALL websites I have been too, except the premium-half-hour trial mode of Pandora and I assume paid accounts. Only radio mode exposes the sound in a clear way that can be modified.
So why do this? We have heard some of the world’s greatest music ever recorded, but it is usually at the same speed and similar experience. So try slowing down one of your absolute top 10 favorite songs by just 4 or 5 percent but keep time-stretching on, and then try with it off. With mild changes it is fine, but around the 90-92% mark I can clearly hear the choppy robotic sound of this effect. Some people or most people may not be bothered by it at that level, but try 0.80 and 75, just as on podcasts or online video, it sounds absolutely horrible.
Audacity for changing tempo, without the choppy sound
If you cannot adjust to the lowered pitch, use Audacity’s change tempo effect, and select high-quality stretching. Also a quick note on pitch, reducing pitch is not an issue with time-stretch or in this case, not checking the box (high-quality stretching) in Audacity will sound fine–identical to change speed effect which allows pitch to shift like a record.
The small slider in audacity, just below the play buttons does the same, with its own play button beside it.
Increasing pitch is what causes that awful robotic sound, which is what time-stretch does when slowing down a song, bringing up the pitch to near original.
Changing tempo with the high-quality effect in audacity will sound a little bit odd, but light-years better than the simplistic quick time-stretch used by basically all software on the entire planet. So if you don’t like lower vocal tones, this will get you fairly close to original sound, but slower speed.
I am very interested to know if anyone does this on a regular basis, and what music sounds good at slower speeds. Pretty Lights works extremely well, as the artist intentionally speeds up vocal samples, so slowing down that music actually allows closer to original sounds and a slower tempo to be enjoyed.