Posted by Florian Wardell | 0 comments
iPhone App: GuitarToolkit
Welcome to our second iPhone app review. Last week, I introduced Photoshop mobile to you, a great little app designed to process basic effects on pictures. This week, I will give you some insights on GuitarToolkit, an app by Agile Partners that – let me state it right now – no guitarist should miss. If you own an iPod touch or iPhone, chances are you love music. Apple’s portable media players are exceptional: The design, quality and user interface are the best on the market. Anyway, if you do like music, chances are are that you play an instrument, right? Well if you happen to play the guitar, I’m sure you’ve used a tuner and metronome before, looked up chords and tried to find the right scales for your awesome solo. Usually, people use dedicated tools for this: A little Korg tuner, a metronome, books for the chords and scales. Well, this is sooo 2008 my friends. Forget about your cluttered guitar tool bag, and have a look at GuitarToolkit.
What it does
As mentioned earlier, GuitarToolkit is like the swiss army knife of guitarists. It has a chromatic tuner that can tune to any frequency, supports custom tunings and that features a high contrast mode for live performance, a metronome with 13 different sound effects and 12 different time signatures, beat flash and tap pad, a chord library with over 500,000 chords, a chord finder with digital fretboard, and a scale finder for any tuning. It supports 6 and 12 string guitars, 4, 5 and 6 string bass, banjo, ukulele and mandolin. Each supported instrument also has a “lefty mode” option which adjusts chords and scales to reflect those on a left-handed guitar.
But so much for theory. The real question is: “Does it work well?”. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that it works better than anything I’ve used before. The tuner is very responsive. I wasn’t sure the iPhone’s built-in microphone would be able to cope with the various frequencies of a guitar and even bass guitar, but no worries: I crosschecked with a standard dedicated chromatic tuner, and the tuning was always spot on. During rehearsals, with my Eclipse II plugged into a 400 Watt Marshall amp with full gain and distortion, the little app has no problem whatsoever figuring out what string I’m trying to tune.
The metronome is very good as well, and very customizable. You ca choose 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, 2+2+1/4, 3+4/8, 3+3+2+2+2/8 signatures and many more. The sound is very present without being painful, and a flash on the screen indicates a beat, which is great for visual reference. You can slide you thumb to adjust the tempo, or just tap it on the screen.
The fretboard, scales finder, and chord library are very well designed. The screen will show you 4 frets at ounce on the lower part of the board, and then up to 7 frets on the higher part. Touch the string and you will hear a sound according to where you fretted it. The sound is off course very synthetic, but that’s ok, it’s just for reference. The organization of the various libraries is very intuitive: For the chord finder, just tap the screen where your fingers would be on a real guitar and will show you the chord name in real time. The chord library is organized by root/interval, etc…
Again, everything is customizable: the frequency range is 392.0 hz to 494.0 hz, and tunings range from “All fourths” to “open G minor”.
How it looks
It looks great. It really does. The menus and settings are designed with standard iPhone elements, which is good because everything looks familiar, but the various tools, metronome and tuner are a little more “funky”, in a good way. The tuner looks like a 100$+ tuner, and is very readable. All functions are accessed quickly, and the design just looks functional. The metronome, on the other hand, looks futuristic and sleek. it has features that real metronomes can’t have, and these are incorporated in a very natural way into the design. I would say that GuitarToolkit is one of the best designed apps I’ve seen for the iPhone. Attention to detail is great, design ideas are clear and well executed, and the interface is easy to understand without being boring.
Value and verdict
But the question on everyone’s mind is whether or not it is worth its price, 9.99$ that is. Well let’s think about it. A dedicated tuner would be minimum 20$, but one with the functionality described above would be more in the 50-70$ range. A metronome can cost a few hundreds dollars, so let’s just say 100$. A book with 500,000 chords? Let’s say 30$. for a good chord reference book. A digital fretboard, chord finder, scale finder? Not possible. So let’s just take the value of the things that do exist as separate tools, and it comes down to about 180$ minimum. The rest is easy: 9.99$, even if it is quite expensive for app store standards, is a steal!
To conclude, I’d like to say that I wish every paid app was this good. Ripoffs are just too omnipresent on the iTunes app store, and apps too buggy. Developers, have a look at this one, it shall be a standard-setting reference for design, functionality and pricing.
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