While I was playing with FingerPiano to review it my girlfriend asked, “Is that a new piano music app?” and grabbed my iPhone out of my hand and finished my song. I then showed her the song list and she chose “The Entertainer” and proceeded to play it all the way through. She was positively giddy and when she finished said, “I’ve never played the piano before. That was so fun. I want this app on my iPhone.” And she loaded up the app store on her iPhone and purchased it right away. This has only happened a few times before and I’ve downloaded hundreds of apps.

FingerPiano is a great little app that allows you to play classic famous pieces of music using just one finger at a time. This app uses scrolling guides above the keys to show you what note to play and how long to play each note. It’s a brilliant idea that is simple to grasp and pickup. FingerPiano comes with 88 pieces of famous music including: Fur Elise, Canon in D, Amazing Grace, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Arabesque and many more great pieces. If you aren’t familiar with the songs you can have a listen by pressing play. You may also jam along with the song if you’d like. This is a really neat feature as I wasn’t familiar with a few of the included songs. The only real problem I have is that the playback sound a bit stacatto, quantisized, or robotic. If a swing slide feature was include that would be neat… or another way to “humanize” the playback of the songs

The piano sound is ok and sounds a bit like a toy piano which is ok for this app… it doesn’t really bother me. If you are looking for an iPhone piano with the best sound I’d recommend Grand Pro.

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There are many tuner apps available for the iPhone and not all were developed equally. Audio Tuner was developed by Supernifty and I’m happy to say that it is… super nifty! I love this tuner for a few reasons. First, it works! I tuned an acoustic guitar, a clean electric through an amp and was even able to tune an unplugged Les Paul! Then I compared with an expensive rack tuner that I have and it was right on the money! Nice! Another thing I like about Audio tuner is that is gives you a full spectrum analysis. So I can have this app on and sing a note and see the peak of the frequency on the app. This is such a great way to practice your pitch if you are a singer. I was fiddling around with this idea and really started to get into it.

There is a button called “Hear Note” that when turned on generates a tone to confirm the note you choose. On the frequency analyzer you will see a vertical line that says “Target”. This is your target note. If you try to sing the “Target” note and watch your voice’s frequency tracked, you will really start to see how this app could help a singer perfect his/her pitch. The developer doesn’t claim that this app should be used by singers, though. I was just commenting on the hidden potential of this little mini spectrum analyzer.

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If you are a guitar player or songwriter I think you will love the app MySongbook - Lyrics and Chords… I do. this little app helps you create, find, view and manage song chords and lyrics. It uses the ChordPro format to display chords. You can find free songs in ChordPro format all over the internet. Some of the best websites being Chordie.com and Ultimate-Guitar.com.

ChordPro format is a machine-readable songsheet syntax which is relatively easy on the eyes and fairly easy to edit when you get used to it. If you compare the first and second screencaps in the gallery below, you can get a feel for the syntax. I found this song on Chordie and many of the chords were wrong. For instance on the third love, _____ there was a G or G7, but to me the G13 sounds like the studio version of the song. MySongbook doesn’t necessarily know the fretboard shape of a G13. That’s because the ChordPro song file format comes with a large number of common chord grids, but not every chord is included… there are just too many chords! Good news is that, with a snippet of code, you can define custom chord grids to your songs so that when you click on a crazy chord like the G13, you can see the chord shape quickly and easily! Oh yeah, the code. Put this at the beginning of your song file:

{define: G13 base-fret 0 frets 3 5 3 4 5 3}

There are a few ways to use MySongbook. There are 3 tabs at the bottom of the screen. You can either create a new song from the “Artists” list or “Songs” list by pressing on the + button on the upper right part of the screen. The “Find New Chords” tab brings you to the search area. From here you can search the web for chord charts, quickly visit your bookmarks, and search Chordie.com and Google.com. Photo 7 in the gallery below shows the search page and photo 8 shows my bookmarks.

How To
I’ll do a search on Chordie.com from within MySongbook. First I type “The Beatles” in the search field because they are my favorite band of all time. The app finds different references to “Beatles” so we click the first link. The search results provide us with a long list of Beatles songs to browse through. I scroll down until I find “All You Need Is Love”. Now for my favorite part. If the song is ChordPro compatible you will see the little blue “Save Chords” button on the lower right go from being grayed out and to blue. Press the blue “Save Chords” button to save the song chord chart to your iPhone. Easy as that. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that MySongbook searches the web for these chord charts and virtually anyone with a text program can make a chord chart… so they are definitely not all accurate/professional. But some songs are perfect and all of them can be edited after they are downloaded to your iPhone. And for the songs that are not accurate… we’ll just have to fix the chords and lyrics where we see fit. That’s one of the great things about Mysongbook!

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We will be reviewing the awesome new iPhone apps StudioApp and Looptastic Minimal Edition in the next day or so.

Also, coming up we will have an overview of our top 10 favorite audio/voice recorder apps. A few days a go a friend of mine asked me what I thought the best iPhone app is (what else is new?) for recording quick snippets of audio. I really didn’t know how to answer his question so I decided to do a quick article about it… I’ll have it finished mid-next week.

Much more to come…

I never thought that one day I would be carrying around a Casio SK-1 sampler keyboard in my pocket. Federico Frezza’s Rec & Play helps make my dream come closer to a reality. This little sampler is just plain fun and does exactly what you’d expect it to… maybe more… and has features that the SK-1 didn’t, such as the ability to hold more than one sample at a time. Also, the SK-1 only has enough memory to hold 1.4 seconds of sampling while Rec & Play will hold as much as our iPhone will allow. I just love that I can save my sounds to memory. I know, I’m easy, but it seems that many apps lately don’t have a save feature in version 1. Anyway, I sampled my piano, my baby burping, myself whistling, etc. I’m happy to say that this app didn’t crash at all and is very simple to use.

Basically you touch the “Rec” button on the top right and wait for the 3…2…1… countdown to begin sampling your sound. Tapping the “Rec” button again stops the recording. You can now play the keyboard to hear your sound at a different pitch and length on every key. At this time you can also press “Mem” to name and save your sample. Or press “Rec” again to sample over the current sound if you aren’t happy with it.

The button on the upper left allows you to toggle between three different screen modes. Clicking “pad” brings you to a screen with an illustration of a galaxy. Moving your finger over this area will raise and lower the pitch of the currently loaded sample. The “easy” button enables you to use your sample and play a preset melody by tapping a button. The “keys” button then returns you to the keyboard. The keyboard has a 5 octave range from C1 - C5. It’s always fun to sample something rhythmic, fingers taping, keys rustling, and then play a very low sample, say, on C1 or so. You can get some really interesting artifacts and rhythms if you listen. You never know where you next great compositional idea will come from. Even these simple little “toy” audio apps can inspire great things.

The developer, Federico Frezza, let me know that he considers his app,

“more of a fun gadget than a real musical instrument. For instance, it doesn’t do time-stretching, as it is too slow to be performed in real-time.”

Federico also said that he has many ideas for this app and is open to suggestions.

We have some ideas for future releases that we think will make our app interesting even for serious musicians.

I can’t wait to see what he has in mind. Although Rec & Play may not be a serious sampler it is a solid app that will provide hours of fun for musicians and non-musicians alike… and not just fun… again I say that I think that some of the best musical ideas start from quirky gadgets such as Rec & Play. Did I mention that it can handle chords? I sampled myself whistling a C note and then played 4 and 5-note chords to test the sound and the app. Rec & Play held up again! Great fun!

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Not many music app sales this weekend so we stretched it out to include the past week or so:

Free

• Bugle ($0.99 > Free) - it’s free
• iXY MIDI Controller ($0.99 > Free) - get it while it’s free!
• MIDI Motion Machine ($0.99 > Free) - accelerometer based MIDI controller app

$0.99 and Up

• Name That Guitar Riff ($1.99 > $0.99) - hours of fun!

$1.99 and Up

• Star Scales ($2.99 > $1.99) - refine your guitar scale knowledge
• Time-Shift Radio ($4.99 > $2.99) - listen to your favorite songs over and over… on the radio!
• Fingerboard ($6.99 > $4.99) - visualize where scales overlap on the guitar!
• StudioApp ($8.99 > $7.99) - get your rap on!

I wanted to do this quick post because for a limited time only you can download this app for FREE! And because it’s a great guitar learning tool. Get it >>

Guitarist’s Reference by Maj9.com, is a great tool for learning the guitar. From chords to scales to arpeggios to support for lefties, this little app is jam packed with features.

First off, I want to say that I feel for the developer of this great app. If you look at the reviews, most are very good. There is one reviewer in particular who praises the app, but then leaves a 1 star rating by accident… and a few other bad review are just numbskulls… and with only 17 or so reviews, it really hurts the overall rating of this useful app. Everyone who gave this app a bad review… please update! And if you download the app and like it, show him some love and give him a positive review.

We will spend a bit more time with this app and do a full review, but right now I think my favorite feature is the Test Me mode.Test Me allows you to test your knowledge of the guitar. Version 2.0 added multiple choice and a scoring system!!

:: App Store Page :: FREE for a limited time which will save you $2.99.
:: Web ::

When apps such as iTabla are FREE it makes life just a little bit better. If you need to get your Indian percussion groove or drone on there is no better place to look than with Vidya Multimedia’s great music app iTabla. This app functions and sounds great. So what is a Tabla and who is Tanpura? Here is an explanation from Wikipedia:

The tambura (Devanagari: तम्पूरा) is a type of stringed instrument found in different versions in different places around the world; most are plucked lutes. The New Grove Dictionary of Music assigns the term to the Eastern European variety of the saz, and to the Indian fretless drone lute.

iTabla also comes with a powerful tabla of course. The tabla is an Indian percussion instrument used in all types of music from classical to popular to religious.
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If you’re a guitar player like me and like to have your guitar with you at all times you will probably like PocketGuitar. Obviously no virtual guitar can take the place of the real thing, but PocketGuitar makes a fun go at it and does a great job. There are several guitars available in the app store and we have tried them all, but PocketGuitar is one of the most satisfying.

With six built-in instruments including: Acoustic-Electric Guitar, Electric Guitar, Classical Guitar, Muted Guitar, Electric Bass, and Ukulele) you have a wide variety of tones to play with. You can also apply chorus, delay and distortion effects to each of the guitars and can chain up to 2 effects at a time. Shaking the iPhone while you are playing creates a wammy bar vibrato effect. And Jimi Hendrix couldn’ve traded in his reversed right-handed Strat because you can switch the app into left handed mode.

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Harp is a really handy music tool by developer You Just Made Music. The samples could be better and it should be called Autoharp, but other than that I have to say that I use it quite frequently and I really like it.

The reason I say it should be called Autoharp is because like an autoharp you choose your desired chord and then strum the chord. On a harp you actually have to finger the chord more like a guitar or piano.

I like the way Harp is laid out because I have easy access to the circle of fifths along with all the chord variations… that’s 168 different chords at my fingertips. It’s very easy to strum the bar on the right while changing the chords with the left hand. If you want to play an extended chord simply touch the root note and then glide or slide to the structure to extend the chord. It’s a great way to test chord progressions. I’m not recommending this app be thought of as an instrument that you will plug in and record, but more of a tool that you can quickly try different chord changes to help speed along songwriting or inspire new directions.

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