Excellent guitar learning app

Anything that can help me improve my guitar playing skills is welcome in my book. The introduction of guitar lessons by the stars in GarageBand was a great idea by Apple but if you that hasn’t helped you hit the big time yet, then there are teaching alternatives out there such as Guitar Guru.

GuitarGuru teaches you how to play your favorite songs as the virtual fretboard guides sync with your CDs, audio files or the bundled MIDI files. You can choose three main viewpoints – minimized, maximized and full screen. The latter two expand the fretboard right across your screen which looks a bit of a mess so I stuck with the minimized version. You’re presented with cliche of cliches, the first 10 seconds of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin to get you started.

The sound is in MIDI and the frets highlight where your fingers should go as each note is played. You can however use a CD or MP3 file instead although you have to provide this yourself of course. By clicking the music note, you can change song – you’re given about 20 for free including Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix, Blackbird by the Beatles and Everyday is a Winding Road by Cheryl Crow. You can change the tempo with a slider.

Guitar Guru is well presented, very easy to use and I can see how it could easily improve my playing if I persevered with it. The downside is that to have the tab for the full song, you have to buy the songs online which cost around 6 or 7 dollars – pretty steep if you ask me.

Guitar Guru is an excellent application although make sure you’ve got enough to spend buying the songs to make it a worthwhile investment.