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Top 5 Must-Download Apps for Beginning Guitarists
From the iconic riffs of Jimi Hendrix to the classical virtuosity of Andres Segovia, guitarists have left an incredible mark on the musical landscape. The rise in the number of guitarists over the years has been a remarkable trend in the world of music.
However, learning an instrument this complex is a challenge, and learners might want to supplement their lesson time with practice outside of the studio but they don’t know where to start. Hence, in this article, we’ll explore our top 5 picks for must-download apps to maximize your guitar practice time!
1. Fret Trainer
Fret Trainer is an app that helps you learn and memorize the fretboard quickly. It offers exercises, games, and quizzes to improve your knowledge of scales, notes, and chords on the guitar. The app displays the guitar’s fretboard, allowing you to see the finger positions of notes and intervals on the neck. This helps you understand the layout of the fretboard more clearly.
Fret Trainer even allows you to test yourself on individual notes across the fretboard and on identifying the positions of specific scales or chords. We love that you can customize the difficulty level and the specific areas of the fretboard you want to work on to tailor the practice to your learning goals and that Fret Trainer tracks your progress over time so you can see improvement and hold yourself accountable.
Knowing the fretboard is a crucial skill for improvisation and solo playing and Fret Trainer can help you get good, quickly.
Fret Trainer can be downloaded on the App Store or Google Play, and is completely free!
2. GuitarTuna
GuitarTuna is a popular and highly accurate guitar tuner app. It works not only for standard tuning but also for alternative tunings and various stringed instruments like bass, ukelele, and more.
Its offering of a wide range of alternate and custom tunings makes it suitable for different musical styles and preferences. We love how the app provides a clear and intuitive interface with visual feedback, showing you the pitch of each string as you play it. This makes tuning easy.
In addition to standard tunings, some versions of GuitarTuna include a metronome feature, allowing you to set a tempo at various meters and practice in time, all in the same app. The app even filters out background noise to ensure accurate tuning even in noisy environments. Our favorite part is that Guitar Tuna can be used offline, so you don’t need a Wi-Fi connection to use the app.
The app is also free and can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play.
3. Ultimate Guitar
Ultimate Guitar is a very popular and comprehensive app for guitarists. It primarily provides an extensive library of guitar tabs, chords, and lyrics for thousands of songs across various musical genres.
You can search for your favorite songs or artists and find user-contributed tabs and chord charts on the Ultimate Guitar website, but the app has a few other features you might want to take advantage of:
Firstly, the app offers interactive tabs that provide a more user-friendly and engaging experience. You can see the tab notation and chord diagrams appear in real-time as you play through a song, making learning and playing along easy and fun. Ultimate Guitar also allows you to transpose songs to different keys and provides capo voicings to accommodate your preferred playing style and vocal range. Users can rate and comment on tabs, share their own tab contributions, and engage with the Ultimate Guitar community. This social aspect can be valuable for seeking advice, sharing your own knowledge, correcting transcription mistakes you may see, and connecting with fellow musicians.
The one drawback of the app is it isn’t completely free to use. Some of its features are kept behind a paywall and you’d have to make in-app purchases to access them, and there are lots of ads in the free version. However, we think that the app’s many benefits outweigh this disadvantage.
Ultimate Guitar can be a valuable resource for guitarists looking to expand their repertoire. Its vast database of user-generated tabs and chords, interactive features, and community engagement make it a go-to app for musicians of all skill levels. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced player, Ultimate Guitar can help you grow exponentially.
4. Yousician
Yousician is a popular music learning app for various instruments, including guitar, piano, bass, ukelele, and voice. It is designed to help users learn, practice, and improve their musical skills through a comprehensive curriculum with step-by-step lessons for all levels, from beginners to advanced players.
The in-app lessons cover a wide range of topics, including chord progressions, scales, techniques, and music theory, but the standout feature of Yousician is its ability to provide real-time feedback on your playing. Using your device’s microphone, the app listens to your guitar playing and evaluates your accuracy, timing, and technique. It offers instant feedback to help you improve.
like Ultimate Guitar, Yousician has an extensive song library that includes a variety of genres and difficulty levels, and you can learn to play popular songs by following along with interactive tabs and chord diagrams. The app also provides backing tracks to play along with. This makes Yousician a fun and engaging way to learn an instrument.
However, the app has its drawbacks – visual learning might not be for everyone, and the app can get quite pricey if you want all the features. Despite this, if you feel like you need immediate feedback during practice time and don’t want to wait a full week until you see your instructor again – you may want to give Yousician a shot.5
5. Chordify
Chordify is an app designed to help musicians learn to play almost any song ever written.
It accomplishes this by automatically generating chord charts and lyrics for songs based on audio or video input.
Chordify uses advanced audio analysis algorithms to recognize the chords being played in a song, either from audio files or from videos hosted on platforms like YouTube.
The app generates chord diagrams that display the chord names above the lyrics of the song, making it easier for users to see when the chord changes happen. It allows users to transpose songs to different keys, which can be useful for singers who want to adapt a song to their vocal range. This makes Chordify a useful tool for singers who want to accompany themselves on an instrument.
The app maintains a library of songs that users can search for and access. Users can also upload their own songs or contribute chord charts to the Chordify community. You can loop specific sections of a song to isolate the challenging parts and practice them before attempting the entire song. You can loop specific sections of a song to practice challenging parts repeated.
The main drawback of this app is that you’d need to upgrade to premium to get its full features, alongside the sometimes inaccurate transcriptions of tricky songs. Even so, it is the most complete chord library available at the moment which is why we chose it to close out our list at number 5!
Let The Music Play!
Hopefully, our top picks inspired you to pick up your guitar and get some practice time on it. Remember that apps can be a valuable learning resource, but here at MP we believe that technology needs to act as a supplement to in-person lessons with a teacher, not as a replacement for them. At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for in-person learning.
If you feel ready to take your first lesson, feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll connect you with a membership advisor who will go over the details with you. You can do that by visiting this link.
In the meantime, happy playing!
