Entertaining Your Kids (and Yourself) with Music: Chapter 2: The Best Tools
There are a variety of ways to start, practice, and learn guitar. Here are the best tools to help you while you’re at home.
GuitarTuna
One of the most indispensable apps (an app I use every day for teaching) is GuitarTuna. It is the all in one tuning and metronome app. It hears your guitar whether you’re plugged into an amp or not. There’s also not an app with better graphics and responsiveness to your touch than this one.
The metronome capabilities are basic, but well done. You can go from 30 beats to 240 beats, which is a good range, but not great. But, it will fit the beginning to intermediate players’ needs with ease.
This app also includes chord diagrams and games, which I love because it's guitar focused.
But to get the most out of this app, GuitarTuna offers a monthly subscription of $4.99. This is steep pricing considering the cost over time, and I don’t think it's worth it. You can easily supplement this apps defincies without the price. Please check out Volume 1 of this series for more info.
Pano Tuner and Pro Metronome
Advanced players need more tuning capabilities. Pano Tuner is perfect for this and it avoids GuitarTuna's monthly subscription price.
I love PanoTuner and have used it long before anything else. It tells you the exact pitch down to the hertz level. Plus, it’s chromatic. This means that it’s not focused on standard guitar tuning, and can tune to any pitch of the musical scale.
This app is awesome due to its capability, design, and because it's free.
The one downside to this app is that it’s extremely sensitive to sound of any kind. You don’t have to play anything on the guitar for the app to have a freak out. This shouldn’t dissuade you from it because once you play a guitar string it will focus on that sound. Then it will give you the correct tuning within a fraction of a cent. It's near perfect.
For the music history people out there, you can also change what the app thinks "A" should equal. This includes the capability of changing A to 415, 430, or any number your heart desires.
Another app for advanced players is Pro Metronome. This app has a lot of customizable capabilities. This includes beat divisions, different sounds, and a beat range of 10 to 500 beats per minute. Why you would need that? I don’t know, but I love that it has it. This is my go-to metronome app.
Yousician
Guitar Hero was one of the video games that got me into playing guitar in the first place. Now you can play Guitar Hero with a real guitar through Yousician.
Yousician is the sister app to GuitarTuna. Yousician helps you play popular songs, melodies, chords, bar chords, and so much more. It’s a videogame with a real guitar. The best part is KIDS LOVE IT! I have plenty of students who love playing songs on Yousician because it feels like a game to them. If they’re having fun and learning at the same time, why wouldn’t this be an awesome option for anyone playing guitar?
Well for one thing, Yousician seems to create a mindset of “If it doesn’t feel like a game I can win at, I don’t want to play it.” To clarify, kids who play it lack understanding the guitar. Playing the game also makes kids not want to play anything that’s not in the game. The worst part is it takes their attention away from how the guitar sounds to simply winning the game.
But, it's not cheap. Yousician clocks in at about $9.99 per month if you buy an annual subscription, or $19.99 if you pay by the month. That means you’re paying between $120-$240 PER YEAR for a video game. While learning the guitar should be fun and engaging, Yousician is an expensive method for doing so.
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