How to Loop Part of a YouTube Video (A–B Repeat)

Right-click on the video and choose Loop. The video now repeats forever, from the beginning. That is fine for a 20-second TikTok-length clip and useless for a four-minute lesson where you need bar 33.

Worth knowing it exists, so you don’t install something to discover you didn’t need it. For a short lick video, this plus the playback speed menu is a complete practice setup and costs nothing.

Option 2: the start/end URL trick (free, clunky, still useful)

YouTube’s embed player accepts a time window as URL parameters. Take the video ID from the watch URL and build this:

youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID?start=45&end=61

Both numbers are in seconds. The player will then only play from 0:45 to 1:01. Add &loop=1&playlist=VIDEO_ID and many browsers will repeat that window on their own.

The honest downsides: you have to work out the timestamps by hand, changing them means editing a URL, and you are watching on a bare embed page rather than the normal watch page. It is a real answer for a section you will come back to for months (bookmark the link and it is one click forever). It is a bad answer for the way practice actually goes, where you move the loop every few minutes.

Option 3: a real A–B repeat

This is what a looper pedal does, and what CD players used to have a button for: press A at the start of the passage, press B at the end, and the player plays that window on repeat until you tell it to stop. Nudge either point by a second when you clip the first note.

The difference from the URL trick isn’t the looping; it’s that you can move the loop while you play. Practice doesn’t sit still. You loop two bars, get them, slide the window forward two bars, get those, then widen it to join them up. Any method where changing the loop means editing a URL and reloading the page will lose to that within about five minutes.

How to actually use a loop

The loop is the easy part. The method is what turns twenty repetitions into progress instead of twenty repetitions.

1. Make the loop too short. Whatever section you were about to loop, halve it. One bar around the thing that breaks. If the loop contains a part you can already play, you are spending most of the repetition practicing something you have finished learning.
2. Include one beat of run-up. Start the A point a beat before the hard bit, not on it. Almost every failed chord change is a preparation problem, and if the loop starts on the change you never rehearse the approach.
3. Slow the loop until it is clean, then bring it up 5% at a time. Speed and looping are the same tool used together (see slowing a video down properly).
4. Add a click. A loop teaches you the notes; a metronome over the top teaches you where they sit in time, which is usually the real problem. Here’s how to run one over the video.
5. Stop while it is still going well. The last repetition is the one your hands remember. Ending on three sloppy ones because you were tired teaches the sloppy version.

Looping a file instead of a video

For a backing track or a teacher’s recording sitting on your own machine, the Practice Player on this site loops, slows, and transposes local audio and video files in the browser. Nothing gets uploaded: the file never leaves your computer.