Using Apps to Make You a Better Musician

If you’re a beginner musician, learning to play an instrument on your own can be challenging. Getting frequent music lessons from a professional can be extremely expensive, up to $100 or more for a single lesson!

Luckily, you can use the smartphone or tablet that you already have to make learning to play a musical instrument much easier. Here are the best ways that you can use your phone or tablet to become a better musician.

Use a Metronome to Stay on Rhythm

You can find a variety of metronome apps on any app store that will be very useful to you if you’re new to music. Metronomes play a steady “tick”-ing sound at your desired beats per minute that will allow you to stay on the correct tempo as you play your music. Every musician has used a metronome at some point in their career, and by using your smartphone you can have it with you whenever you need.

Tune Your Instrument with your Phone

If you’re on the road often, keeping your guitar, ukulele, or other instruments in tune can always be a challenge. If you let your instrument get out of tune, your music just won’t sound right. To solve this issue, you can download a guitar/ukulele tuner app. These apps will use your device’s microphone to listen to your instrument and give you real time feedback on how to adjust the tuning to get it sounding perfect. Special travel ukuleles and guitars are also known for holding a tune longer.

Have a Mobile Songbook

One of the best uses of a smartphone or tablet while learning a new instrument is using it as a reference book. You can easily look up how to form different chords on-the-fly, without having to flip pages in a book.

You can also look up lyrics and chords to specific songs, allowing you to have an infinite mobile songbook that fits right in your pocket! If someone asks you to play a certain song, you can easily look up the chords and lyrics in a jiffy.

Record your Performances

Even if you’re just starting out on your musical journey, you’ll greatly benefit from recording your music from time to time. You won’t be looking for professional quality when recording on your phone, but being able to listen to what you just played will give you better feedback than anything else as to what you can do to improve.

For example, you may find that you’re playing a song too quickly, or that you’re singing a little too high or low for the song. You can also record yourself on video if you’re wondering what your performance looks like visually.

Give Yourself Some Drums

If you want to add an extra dimension to your music and don’t want to spend time learning to play the bongos or drums, you can download a drum kit on your phone. These apps will let you build drum loops that sound really cool, and can also act similar to a metronome in that they’ll keep a steady tempo for you to follow along with.

This guest post was written by Kyle Hollings, a musician with a goal of making it as easy as possible to get people started playing an instrument. You can read more from Kyle at Musical Pros.