5 Great Apps For Musicians – Kit your iPhone out with the...

5 Great Apps For Musicians – Kit your iPhone out with the essential music apps

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harmonic ear trainer

For any musician out there who is iPhone equipped, here are the essential apps to turn your phone into the ultimate Muso Swiss Army knife!

cleartune 1.Cleartune – Easy to use, accurate and precise

5 stars!

Cleartune is a simple but accurate chromatic tuner that allows you to precisely tune an instrument using the internal microphone on your phone. Using the note-wheel display you can quickly find your pitch, then use the ultra-sensitive, 25-cent range, fine tuning meter you can achieve perfect tuning. This app is a must have, and is easily the cheapest professional tuner available!

App updated 14th October 2010, Developed by Matthew Finn, £2.39

Buy it from Cleartune - Chromatic Tuner - bitcount

metronome 2.Metronome – All the features of a physical pendulum metronome, combined with the portability of a phone.

4 stars!

Again a simple but very useful app to have, and it’s free! Capable of a range of time signatures, this app includes both the aural aspect of a metronome as well as the visual aspect by showing a real-time pendulous metronome on the screen. You can move the weight on the pendulum to set the tempo, or select the musical term you desire (such as Allegro or Andante), or to be more specific you can enter the BPM at the top manually.

App updated 11th September 2010, Developed by MarketWall.com, Free!

Get if from Metronome - MarketWall.com

jazz buddy 3 – Jazz Buddy – A user-friendly database of a chord/scale relationships.

5 stars!

For the more studious musicians among you, and I don’t just mean the jazzers, this straightforward app acts as a quick guide to show which different scales will work over different chords. Jazz Buddy will show you what scales can be played over major, minor, dominant and diminished chords as well as many others, alongside showing what notes each scale will include. Admittedly this is aimed at jazz musicians, but for anyone wanting to improvise over more technical and colourful chords this app is essential.

App updated 28th April 2010, Developed by Audio Artillery, £1.19.

Jazz Buddy - Audio Artillery

harmonic ear trainer 4. Harmonic Ear Trainer – Practice your listening skills and hone your ability to recognize all intervals and chord qualities.

5 stars!

Here is one app that has you all you need to master identifying the qualities of all intervals, triads and seventh chords. Either practice your intervals or chords individually, or steadily make your way through the challenges. This app focuses of learning by hearing, and is essential to any musician wishing to improve their listening skills.

App updated 28th April 2010, Developed by Jon Lay, £1.19.

Buy from Harmonic Ear Trainer - Jon Lay


SightRead 5. SightRead – A brilliant app for those who are just starting to learn to sight-read

4 stars!

For those who are new to sight-reading this is a great tool to practice with. The concept is simple; select a scale and notes from that scale appear on the screen at random. All you have to do is play them correctly using the piano shown on the screen. This object is to do this as quickly as possible, and the number of notes can be increased to make the challenge harder. Whilst this app doesn’t take into account timing it’s still a valuable resource for any beginner sight-reader.

App posted 20th August 2009, Developed by Takanori Sato, £0.59.

Buy it fromSightRead - Takanori Sato


8 COMMENTS

  1. Yes I am a musician thanks. Are you? And have used all these apps extensively with great results, and have found them extremely useful.

    I just used the apps and shared my experience. Sorry I didn’t work for you. Thanks for your intelligent comment.

  2. Hi, goot topic! I really like the StudioMini. I have both iPhone and Ipad Version. For iPhone the 4tracks, its really cool to make small records!

  3. Nice article Sam. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Guitar Jam Tracks for iPhone. Both my son and I play guitar (he has the iPod touch) and I have an iPHone….I was looking for an app to practice along with and this one is fantastic. Super easy to use, gives you nice pictures of the scales and plays the jam track in every key. They give you a lot for the money ! I have Acoustic Blues and Jazz –both highly rated apps. Enjoy!

    http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guitar-jam-tracks-acoustic/id375250919?mt=8

    C

  4. My fellow-musician,
    You must have done something wrong !!
    I found about 100, all free !!!, are far better then yours.
    I can predict that this is your first day. I promis you you’ll find muchf
    more and better. I can send you a list.
    Let me know. Best. Dennis Coen. Holland

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