The iPhone has given us a lot through its various apps. It’s a way to read, pass time, play games, and more. You can even fake a call. Musicians, however, are most interested in a variety of musical apps that have hit the iPhone’s app store, and guitarists in particular are ecstatic about some of the excellent choices available to them. You could even learn guitar pretty much entirely from an iPhone, with the right programs.
Here’s a look at a few apps that can help guitarists learn to master their instruments, all available on the iPhone.
1. Metronome – This free app is a simple metronome, and it’s the most basic and important practice tool in a guitarist’s arsenal. A metronome allows a guitarist to practice in rhythm, and avoids a lot of nasty habits that can inhibit your ability to learn the guitar. Any time you practice, you should be using a metronome, and you can have a great one with you all the time on your iPhone for free. This app is a no-brainer download.
2. Karajan – A guitarist is only good as his or her ear, and Karajan is a great ear training iPhone app. If you use it for about twenty minutes a day, you’ll quickly learn the relationships between different notes, a vital skill for guitar players and really any musician. The app is well put together, and trains your ear for note relationships, chords, scales, and more. It is a bit pricey at $15, but well worth the price for a fun and easy to use ear training iPhone app for guitarists.
3. Guitar Scale Essentials – This $2 app works very simply and effectively to help guitarists learn their scales. It displays a large variety of scales in both musical notation and tablature, enabling guitarists to look over various scales and memorize them, even when they’re not near their guitars. Its plain, easy to read format makes it a great iPhone app for novice guitarists. Remember, if you don’t know your scales, you can’t expect to play solos and songs very well.
4. Guitar Toolkit – Whether you’re just learning to play the guitar or you’re absolutely an expert, Guitar Toolkit is a great app priced reasonably at about $10 for all that it offers. It offers a full chord library to help you learn chords up and down the fretboard, a guitar simulator on the iPhone, scale references in different tuning, a very accurate chromatic tuner, and a cool metronome. If you’ve got $10 to drop on an iPhone app to help you learn guitar, this is the app to get.
Do you know of any other iPhone apps that can help people learn how to play the guitar? Post in our comments section below.
