I have been playing guitar off and on for quite some time now.  I started when I was in seventh grade.  We had the choice between band (I was tired of clarinet), chorus (I can barely sing in the shower), or mandatory guitar lessons.  Luckily, those mandatory guitar lessons were taught by the awesome (and legendary Pirates fan) Dr. Jones.  Because of him, I developed a real love for the instrument.  Well, the ability to play Twisted Sister didn’t suck either.  Hey, it was the 80’s…

One of the problems with playing the guitar, like any instrument, is the hassle of lugging around your music.  Music books can be large and difficult to use as the binding constantly snaps shut.  Loose sheets, while easier to use, can be a real pain to carry around, especially if you drop them, resulting in a mess of unorganized paper,which may or may not loosely resemble a song again someday.

One solution is to store all of my music (guitar players refer to their music as “tabs”) on my mobile device.  The small screen, however, makes this a pretty cumbersome task.  It can be hard to see, and involves way too much scrolling for my taste.  So, I was pretty excited to see how this would work on the massive screen real estate offered by the iPad.  Fortunately, there are some fantastic apps out there, and the good folks at Agile Partners were nice enough to oblige me with a copy of their Guitar TabToolKit for the iPad to check out and review. 

So, let’s all grab our guitars, I will be playing my fantastic new Washburn electric guitar, which a friend recently sent me.  I am pretty excited to get going with this guitar, as it has been quite some time since I played an electric guitar with any regularity.  These days, I generally stick to an acoustic guitar.

Before we get started, let’s take a step back and talk about what exactly are “tabs”.  Obviously, if you play guitar, you are more than likely familiar with this term, which is short for tabulature.   Tabs are the method by which guitar players communicate the fingering on the strings.  They can stand alongside standard music, or stand alone.  Either way, they tell you the fingering of the notes and chords on the string.  OK, now that that is out of the way, let’s get on with it.

TabToolkit allows you to download, store, and organize your digital tab library.  You can view the songs in your library by name or artist.  You can also mark favorite songs to make them easy to find, or just jump right to your recently opened songs to pick up where you left off. 

Now, the Guitar TabToolkit comes preloaded with a few tabs and lessons, but not much of a library.  They will leave that up to you.  You can search the Internet for tabs from your computer or, my preference, straight from the iPad.  Just hit that Download button to zip over to the Ultimate Guitar website, where you can find all of your favorite guitar tabs. 

OK, I know what you are thinking.  Enough of the how to stuff, let’s see the tabs.  Get to it already, so, let’s go ahead and get there. When you are surfing through the web, you will want to make sure to download tabs in the Power Tab or Guitar Pro Tab format.  Here’s why.  If you just download the straight tabs or chords, then things will work just fine.  The chord will be displayed on your screen, but nothing more.  Just a copy of the page (see above).  Doable, playable, and useable, but not much mroe.   You are really going to be missing quite a bit as you are about to see.  Best of all, these tabs are all free.  Now, I will say that most of them are unofficial, meaning they were transcribed by other guitar players, not the band themselves, but most of these writers have really done an outstanding job.

OK, now that that is out of the way, let’s take a look at what you will see when you download (did I mention the downloads are all free) a properly and fully formatted tab sheet.  Instead of just those handwritten notes and numbers, you will now find a complete tablature sheet, showing both the tabs and standard musical notation.  The nice thing here is that you can hide either of these.  So, if you don’t read sheet music, go ahead and turn off the standard notation.  On the other hand, if you think real men play real notes, and tabs are for cheaters, then turn that off.  Frankly, I really enjoyed being able to translate the tabs into standard notation and see the two side-by-side, so I left them both active.  Additionally, I found it was helpful to leave both the tabs and standard notation on, because tabs do not give you all of the information you need.  Standard notation music tells you how long to hold each note.  This information is lost in the tab format.

On the bottom of the screen, you will also see a representation of an instrument.  You can toggle this between a guitar, keyboard, or no instrument.  This is a pretty cool feature.  As the music reaches each note, the fretboard or keyboard will light up to show you the proper fingering to play that note or chord.  This makes TabToolkit a fantastic teaching tool as well.

OK.  so let’s go ahead and hit that play button and see what happens, because this is pretty cool.  The app is going to walk you right through the song.  Not only will it play the music, but it will also scroll through the tabs/notations, displaying the correct notes as the music plays.  A red line scrolling through the music will help you track your place in the song.  If you ever need a minute in the middle, just hit the pause button to take a break or work through a difficult section on your own.  At the same time as all that, the fretboard or keyboard at the bottom will show you the correct fingering.  So, there you have, this may be the best method I have tried for learning new songs.  The app does just about everything except actually play the song for you. 

Now, I will say that the app is only as good as the tabs you choose to download.  So, I should note the the folks at Guitar Tabtoolbox do not compose or write any of these tabs.  They merely provide a really nice vehicle through which you can display, access, and utilize the information in the tabs.

Guitar Tabtoolbox is available from the iTunes App Store for $9.99.  If you are a guitar player, then this may be the best $10 you ever spend.

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