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THE GUITAR PLAYERS COMMUNITY

Guitar Toolkit iPhone Application

For most guitarists, a tuner is an essential piece of kit. Many of us also like to use a metronome when practicing to help keep good time. Whilst chord books make pretty dull reading, they are useful to quickly look up the odd complex chord. What if you could have all of these in one iPod shaped device…

What They Say

"Essential guitar utilities, including an amazingly flexible tuner and a library of over 1500 chord variations, all on your iPhone."

Features

• Chromatic Tuner with over 40 different tunings
• Scale references - touch each note to hear it
• Chord library with over 260 chord maps giving over 1500 different chords
• Adjustable metronome with visible flash, tab beat and multiple different sounds
• Support for 6 string and 12 string guitar, 4 and 5 string bass.
• Left hand mode for chords and scales

The app is available in English, and requires an iPhone or iPod touch with the iPhone 2.0 software or later.

In Use

I normally tune my guitars with my Boss GT10 or the TU-80 (the latter mainly for my acoustic). I wasn’t able to test the tuner on the Guitar Toolkit because I have a 1st Generation iPod Touch. With the latest firmware update, Apple have enabled the audio input capabilities of the 1st Gen iPod Touch using the dock connector. iPhones and 2nd Gen iPod Touch owners can use the built in microphone or the headphone microphone. I am hoping to get hold of a dock connector style microphone and will update the article afterwards.

The app is well made - a clean user interface and simple controls. The info button could have been a little bigger as it’s easy to miss on some of the configurable options. That was my only gripe. The fretboard is smart and the notes are marked with large clear discs so that you can easily identify the notes in the chord or scale.

The chord library is concise and has just over 1500 different chords based on 260 or so variations. You get the basic major and minor chords as well as augmented, diminished and suspended chords. The library also contains some chord inversions and also displays a couple of different positions for the same chord. These are easy to select - choose the root note, the chord type and then the position or inversion and the chord will show up on the fretboard. You can use the touch display to enlarge the guitar neck so that it’s easier to read.

The metronome is simple, but does everything you need. The tone can be changed to a number of different two-tone sounds and the time signature can also be set. The controls are simple; a button to turn the metronome on and off, and a scroller to adjust the tempo. You can also tap the tempo manually by holding one finger on the button and then tapping in time with another finger on the screen. Quite cool.

The scale tool is equally well built. Like the chord library, you simple select a key and a scale type and the fretboard will list all the notes for that scale. You can press each fret to hear the note. This also supports the list of alternate tunings, so you can see the adjusted note positions for the particular tuning you are using.

This video is a screencast from the Guitar Toolkit Website. It shows the main features of the application.

Overall

This is a really simple yet well made application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You get chords, scales, a tuner and a metronome in one package. Whilst you probably won’t throw an iPod into your gig bag, it’s useful to have to hand. I use the app primarily for looking up some of the more complex chord shapes and it’s really quick and simple. For the sake of £5.99, you can’t really go wrong.

Links

Check out the guitar toolkit website.

You can buy the Guitar Toolkit app from the iTunes store