Excited about learning how to play the guitar? Awesome! You’ll need the perfect beginner guitar, a great teacher by your side, and a personal commitment to learning and improving. Using extra resources like smartphone or tablet apps to help you practice efficiently in between lessons can help a ton, as well. But with so many apps available these days, you may feel a little overwhelmed when you’re trying to find one to download. Below are a handful that we really like.
TakeLessons Live
TakeLessons Live offers online classes that are led by live guitar teachers. With the free membership option, you can join a variety of classes from anywhere in the world. Topics covered include guitar exercises, music theory, scales, song tutorials, and more.
If you’re looking for a fun way to practice your skills while getting feedback from a real instructor, this is the app for you! TakeLessons Live is available for both iOS and Android and is free.
Guitar Toolkit
For any guitar player, having an app that can function as one of the many tools needed for practice and performance is always nice. There are a lot of apps for guitar that serve as metronomes, tuners, and chord reference charts, but what makes Guitar Toolkit stand out above many of the other apps for guitar is that it combines all of these tools and more into one slick interface. If you need to tune your guitar, this app makes it easy, whether you’re looking for standard tuning for a 6-string, or an alternate tuning for anything between 7 and 12 strings. It can also help you practice scales and arpeggios to get ready for your next lesson!
The Guitar Toolkit app is available in the iTunes App Store for $9.99 from Agile Partners. The cost is a little daunting compared to other apps, but if you’re willing to pay for efficiency and not having to switch apps every time you need to reference a chord chart or switch tuning, this is the best option.
The Gibson Learn & Master Guitar Application
The reputation of Gibson in the guitar-playing world is second to none. So it goes without saying that when they create a mobile app to help with mastering the guitar, it would be an excellent resource as well. This app has it all: a fully functional tuner for either chromatic or standard guitar tuning, a metronome, a chord reference chart, and even video lessons. You can also use the in-app links to get to Gibson’s website, where you can stay updated with the latest news in the guitar industry.
The Gibson Learn & Master Guitar Application is available in both the iTunes App Store as well as the Android Market from Legacy Learning Systems, and is free to download and use.
Lick of the Day
There are a lot of apps for guitar out there that show you how to play guitar solos and popular riffs. What makes this app different is that a lot of the licks showcased in the app are taught by the guitar players that wrote the riff themselves. It’s not every day that you can learn from Joe Satriani!
The Lick of the Day app for guitar is free, but the Lick Packs cost $4.99 each. However, you can still get a lot of the features for free, such as a new free featured lick each week! The app is available in the iTunes App Store from Agile Partners.
Bonus: Ultimate Guitar Tabs
You might already know that Ultimate Guitar has a huge database of online guitar tabs for you to browse through. So it should come as no surprise that one of the most essential apps for guitar is their mobile app, which features the entire library! You can search quickly by song title or artist, or you can narrow your search by a multitude of different parameters, such as difficulty, tuning, and overall rating. And if you’re at a loss for what to play next, you can always use the random tab button to find something new!
The Ultimate Guitar Tabs app is available in the the iTunes App Store, Android Market, and Windows Phone Store from Ultimate Guitar USA, LLC. It costs $2.99, and there are numerous in-app purchases for add-ons, such as a metronome or tuner.
Don’t Forget the Best Resource of All!
These mobile apps for guitar are fantastic for helping you practice, but don’t forget that your private instructor is your best resource of all! He or she will guide you through lessons at a pace appropriate for you, keep you motivated, introduce you to new songs and genres you may not have considered playing, and show you exactly what to practice to improve your skills. Have fun – and keep up the great work!
Photo by ljguitar
Suzy S.