Beginners: What Apps Have You Found Useful? What Would Be Your Dream App?

Gear & Tools Talk
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Greetings, fellow beginners (and all others!).

Have any of you discovered any apps that you’ve found particularly useful/motivating thus far toward learning to play the guitar? What would your dream app do?

I have kept in mind the warning to not get too wrapped up in apps and instead to focus on the guitar. That said, I have found a few apps that indeed focus my attention on the guitar, which has been great.

I have Justin’s app and am enjoying it: Practicing chord changes to backing tracks and designing and using a practice routine have been GREAT.

Before I discovered Justin’s app, I had found the following apps (I have an ANDROID phone): Fretboard Quiz, Harmony City, and Guitar Chord Trainer.

Fretboard Quiz
Fretboard Quiz tests you on your learning of fretboard notes via PLAYING THEM on your guitar. It prompts you for a note and listens out for you to play it. You can control which string(s) you want to learn, which notes, which part of the fretboard, etc.

Harmony City
Harmony City listens to you play chords while backing tracks play in the background. It assesses each chord you strum. It’s an educational app for kids. I got it before I discovered Justin’s app with the backing tracks.

Here’s a screen captured video from my phone as I strum to “Zombie” (I couldn’t get the sound to record):
https://youtu.be/cs5-KO6fumM

Harmony City has been FUN to use, and my chord changes have DEFINITELY improved via practicing with the app. My only issue with this app is that I’ve found it somewhat easy to TRICK the app. For example, if a chord calls for all 6 strings to be played, sometimes playing just a few of the strings will satisfy the app. I have found that to be true of almost all apps that claim to detect and assess chords. I think it just might be an issue with where the technological state of chord detection is. I’m not sure.

Guitar Chord Trainer
Guitar Chord Trainer is an app that listens as you practice chord transitions. It counts the number of chord transitions you do. You can set a few different time limits. You can customize which chords you want to practice.

I reallllllly, really like the concept of this app . . . but it runs into the same issue as the Harmony City app: It’s not hard to trick the app.

My Dream App at This Stage Would . . .
I’m a complete beginner, so I’m working on such things as:

  • proper fretting of chords,
  • achieving sound clarity of chords,
  • strumming the correct strings for various chords,
  • chord transitioning,
    etc.

Given the above, my dream app would have the capacity to listen to me strum a chord and then give me feedback about how well I played the chord. (Technologically, that’s a BIG ASK, I know. LOL. As it is, I will continue to rely on my own ear. Not a bad thing.) This app would also allow me to select chords between/among which to transition, and it would count my transitions. It would record how I’m doing so that I could see my progress over time.

Well, thanks for reading! It’s been good to join this community, where I can discuss the guitar journey with fellow travelers.

I hope this post finds you well. I look forward to hearing about any apps anyone else has found particularly helpful or motivating.

Many blessings!

zys

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For iOS, but may also be available for Android and desktop…

Justin’s app is the best I’ve seen - by far! The combination of a solid video course, timed practice routines, and a deep catalog of curated songs calibrated for your current skill level that you can slow down and play along with is an unbeatable combination.

The only thing I would really like to see added to Justin’s app would be a looping feature.

For metronome and drum backing…

For slowing down, transcribing, and looping songs that aren’t in the Justin app, Anytune Pro.

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Thanks for sharing!

Agreed: Justin’s app is incredibly beneficial. I am so pleasantly surprised and happy about the practice routine component. It’s so customizable. It’s just so THOUGHTFUL of Justin and the team. Each day I use it I’m impressed all over again. :grinning:

Many blessings!

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I’m not using the Justin App. however i’m using the following apps to help me play along with songs:

Songster for Android: i took the ‘pay once for a liftime’ opportunity. Its a great app with a big song library . The only thing missing is a metronome function that is only available on the website plan, that is 9.99 $ / month.

Ultimate Guitar: Very huge library and many variants of the same song and active community. Not expensive, but the app just sucks donkey balls… they just build a wrapper around the website and called it a day. Does not scale good on a tablet and drains the battery very hard.

On the plus side, it has no segmentation, pay once a year and you have the same feature set on webformat and on mobile.

GuitarTuna for the easy metronome function and to tune the guitar when in need of a tuner that you forgot at home.

Tabedit… :roll_eyes: : My previous teacher loves that software, but i just hate it… On desktop its pretty okayish, but on mobile its a disaster…

GuitarPro: You can download the tabs on the Ultimate Guitar site and load them in the GuitarPro software, that does work nicely on tablets!

For training remembering where the notes are:

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It’s not really an app, but the free songsterr version is very good, if compared to ultimate-guitar free version.

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Old guy non app user reading this with guarded interest. :thinking:

What I would say from my years of using different non digital products before Justin
ie in the days of VHS, Beta and Books and no web
The more sources you try to learn from as a beginner the less progress you will make.
You’ll bounce from rabbit hole to rabbit hole and before you know it, that axe and any other gear will get punted on Ebay, as you seek another of life’s distractions.

All that stopped when I found Justin’s website. Don’t care what you use but if you spend all your time bouncing from product to product, app to app, you’ll crash and burn very quickly.

You need consistency, continuity and a solidly laid path. And that is all here. Simples.

Old git, don’t do apps but done ok with Justin, refer to my Roadcase aka Learning log.

My 2 cents but heck after 17 wasted years, what do I know.

:sunglasses:

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Justinguitar Community is the best one out there :sweat_smile:

Other than that I use Justin’s note trainer, UG app and Soundcorset metronome and tuner. And I am good as gold with only those for now :smiley:

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You mean you don’t use his lessons Adi ??? Shame on you !!! :wink:

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Goodness, I don’t even use the lessons any more :roll_eyes:
I ‘learn’ on AVOYP :rofl: (and do a bit of chatting in the Social section)

(This will all change of course, when I get my act together :wink:)

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We talking about apps or in general? Sorry to say but Justin app is not something I feel is useful for me, lessons over the website are a completely different thing and of course I use those! :grinning:

Even though not recently and similar to Brian I will definitely go back to those at some point. Lately I was more focused on translations via Amara and one thing that’s really good about it is a reason for me to watch lesson by lesson of the new course as I was learning on old beginner and intermediate courses. In Grade 1 there isn’t much I haven’t known but I really look forward to doing G2 and further grades. I think I have like 6 or 9 videos left to do :wink:

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Thanks for sharing. And thanks for the details.

I’d heard of GuitarTuna but not the others. I’ll check them out! :slight_smile:

Blessings!

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Thanks for the reply.

I’m enjoying the website, too.

Godspeed on your journey!

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Everyone, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. It’s nice and helpful to learn from others.

I’m new to this forum, and I’m not quite sure how to reply to all the responses. I just got a note from the forum to consolidate my responses if possible, and I’m not sure how to do that. So I’ll just say thanks again, and Godspeed on your guitar journeys!

Many blessings,

zys

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I don’t use a lot of apps. I started with the JustinGuitar app and outgrew it.

My ones are:
Fender Tune (includes metronome and drum tracks as well)
Justin’s One Minute Changes
Ultimate Guitar (for tabs)
And voice memos, for occasional recording

On PC I used to use Rocksmith but found it not very good for actual learning.

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Fender Tune looks pretty good.

I’ve been using Guitar Tuna, but Fender Tune has drum tracks, a chromatic tuner, chord charts, and scale charts.

Free, though you need to create an account to use some of the features.

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My dream app would be a JustinGuitar song play-along type of game, but that works beyond beginner level grade 1 and grade 2.

The fact that the module songs are directly linked to the course is awesome. It’s a much better learning tool than Rocksmith. However, we can’t use it anymore to pratice grade 3 and above which is sad.

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Reviving this, since I was actually looking for a similar thread. I love the lessons in Justin’s app. Some of the practice sessions can fall short of engaging for me. I also use an ear training/fretboard memorization app that I find really useful for reinforcing the fretboard…

Recently I did stop using Justin app besides the lessons and started using UberChord for practice sessions. It’s hard to compete with an extensive development team to be fair, and their thing isn’t video lessons, which Justin excels at, more practice sessions. It was a bit difficult to skip past all the levels I had already exceeded, but once I got to the right level within the app, it’s magic. It incorporates chord changes with weird chords, rhythm elements, etc into games that essentially build up to playing the full (not made easy) version of a song (or few) tied to that level. I started using it last night and I’m hooked lol.

I did download the one minute chord changes, because I do like isolating those (in addition to incorporating them with the rhythm elements and the way uber chord presents it). However, I was a bit disappointed that the chords available on the one minute chord change app didn’t extend to more complex chords out of the box (I.e. barre chords and slightly more complex chord variations). I did just figure out as I was writing this that you can create custom chords, so I just started creating barre chords. I also seem to have issues on an iPhone 14 pro max with the app - where it will work and the mic will pick up the chord changes within the justin guitar app for the first chord change exercise - then it just doesn’t work after that, and the rest of the practice session doesn’t record strums/etc automatically.

@math07 - this is actually exactly what I was looking for, and the closest I found that extends well beyond beginner is uberchord. It absolutely does not replace the comprehensive lessons Justins app and site offer (few services do, I use one other to add a little bit of additional color, but Justins is the most comprehensive of the three or four I purchased and tried) - but it does work really really well to compliment them in an engaging game-like format. It also updates in realtime to your playing and performance and adjusts in realtime to tailor to you. It’s actually quite impressive. It has to be leveraging machine learning, if not AI, under the hood.

Has anyone else found any great apps in the last year and a half (which is light years for apps and technology :slight_smile: )?

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me and my sons enjoyed using Rocksmith years ago when it was on xbox. there were a lot of hacks out there for it too. people writing custom song/lessons for the platform and you could upload them into the xbox, it was kinda cool back in the day. Oldest boy learned to play Thrill is Gone REALLY well by using that.

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