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iPad, iPod touch, & iPhone app reviews from our editors—and you!
Filed Under:
Developer:
Agile Partners Technologies, LLC
Age rating: 4+
Compatibility: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
Requires iOS 3.1 or later
GuitarToolkitCurrent Version: 2.0.1
See more Music app reviews under $15 »
GuitarToolkit is a collection of essential guitar tools, including an extremely accurate tuner, a precision metronome and a massive library of chords, scales and arpeggios - all on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
An App Store iPhone Hall of Fame App.
FEATURES
- Supports 6-, 7- and 12-string guitar, 4-, 5- and 6-string bass, banjo, mandolin, and ukulele.
- Massive libraries of chords, scales and arpeggios for each instrument and alternate tuning. Display notes and intervals, as well as finger positions for chords.
- Now with support for Scale Boxes at specific fret positions, ideal for scale practice.
- Supports standard and common alternate tunings; you can even create your own custom tunings. All chords, scales, and arpeggios are generated to work in the selected tuning!
- Strum chords and tap notes to hear what they sound like.
- Now with movable capo support that can be used with chords, scales and arpeggios.
- On iPad, jump between scales or arpeggios and matching chords with a single tap.
- Chord, Scale and Arpeggio Finders: Touch notes on the on-screen fretboard and GuitarToolkit can identify matching chords, scales and arpeggios.
Tuner
- Highly accurate chromatic tuner using the built-in microphone (or the mic headset with earlier iPod touch devices).
- Full-screen mode on iPad and high-contrast mode on iPhone enable easy viewing.
Metronome
- Precise metronome with a visible flash option, tempo tap pad, 25 sound effects and 22 time signatures. Runs in background while using other GuitarToolkit features or other apps.
GuitarToolkit+ Advanced Metronome
- The GuitarToolkit+ in-app purchase adds Advanced Metronome with a powerful drum machine.
- Your custom drum patterns can include up to 32 instrument tracks, with 75 different drum sounds in 9 categories.
- Powerful time signature control with flexible 4, 8 and 16 beat patterns and optional triplet feel.
- 9 great pre-defined drum patterns included.
GuitarToolkit+ Interactive Chord Sheets
- The GuitarToolkit+ in-app purchase adds beautiful, interactive Chord Sheets to easily capture chord progressions and song ideas.
- Dial up a chord from the library of over 2,000,000 chords and add it easily to a Chord Sheet.
- Chord Sheets are interactive! Tap (fast strum) or press (slow strum) chords to hear them play.
- Print chord sheets and email chords sheets as PDFs to friends or students.
GuitarToolkit+ Custom Instruments
- The GuitarToolkit+ in-app purchase also adds Custom Instruments which lets you customize GuitarToolkit for different instruments you own including guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin and ukulele.
- Set up a custom amp tone - choose from over 60 amp & effects configurations tailored for both acoustic and electric guitars. Powered by the AmpKit tone engine.
- Choose from a variety of string & pickup types: Acoustic - Steel String, Acoustic - Nylon String, Electric - Humbucker, Electric - Single Coil, and more.
- Select a unique instrument icon and fretboard texture (e.g., mahogany, ebony, maple).
- Define instrument tuning (e.g., standard, alternate, custom).
Additional Features
- Supports “lefty mode” which adjusts chords, scales and arpeggios to reflect a left-handed instrument.
- Support for portrait and landscape orientations on iPad.
- Adjustable reference pitch - the default is A=440 tuning. Ideal for pro musicians, especially classical musicians.
GuitarToolkit Review
Several useful tools make this music app a guitar hero
As a musician, I appreciate apps that help me be a better guitar player. And as a software developer, I appreciate apps that are well designed. So both of these reasons are why Agile Partners’ $10 GuitarToolkit is one of my favorite music-related apps.
Strike a Chord: After selecting your instrument, and dialing in the chord you want to play, you can use GuitarToolkit’s mini-fretboard to sound out the chord.
The app’s interface is clean and simple, and provides several tools that any guitar player would find useful. They include:
Tuner
There’s a large number of guitar tuner apps in the App Store, but I’ve found GuitarToolkit’s to be the best. It’s very sensitive and highly accurate. It can operate in chromatic mode or it can isolate notes based on your selected instrument and tuning mode. (More on that below).
Metronome
Besides simply counting out beats per minute, GuitarToolkit’s metronome also lets you set the time signature, which then changes the stress placed on the beats. If you don’t like the standard tick-tock sound, there are many others to choose from, including “The Dreaded Cowbell.”
Instruments
The app lets you fine-tune its tools by instrument type. It defaults to six-string guitar, but you can choose seven- or 12-string, various types of bass, as well as banjo, ukelele and mandolin. Selecting an instrument defaults to its standard tuning, but you can choose from many common alternate tunings or create your own.
Fretboard
The Fretboard screen shows you the fretboard of your selected instrument in the tuning mode you’ve selected. You can strum the strings to sound the open notes. It also provides a “name-that-chord” feature” where you can simply tap on the fretboard to build a chord and the app will tell you the name of that chord.
Chords
The chord finder—which works hand-in-hand with the app’s Instruments and Fretboard modes—is GuitarToolKit’s most useful tool in my opinion. For example, if you want to know how to play a Dm add9 chord in second position on a seven-string guitar in an alternate tuning, simply select your instrument and tuning from the Instruments screen, then go to the Chords screen and dial in the selection. You can then use the mini-fretboard to sound the chord or let the app automatically sound the chords as you change them.
GuitarToolkit runs on both the iPhone and iPod touch, though the original iPod touch lacks microphone support, which is required for the tuner. So a smarter choice for that device might be the $6 “lite” version, which leaves out the tuner feature. GuitarToolkit also runs on the iPad, but the interface is not optimized for that device, which I would really like to see added, even at additional cost. The more I use the iPad, the more I appreciate having the extra display space, especially on apps like this where I might want to view the screen from arms reach.
At $10, GuitarToolkit may not be an impulse purchase for every musician. But everyone should understand that good software is not cheap, and you definitely get what you pay for. So I think that GuitarToolkit is well worth the sawbuck.
[Brian Beam is a musician, Robin Trower fan and partner with BOLD Internet Solutions, living somewhere near Kansas City.]
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