Archives for July 2015

6 Cool Guitar Player Apps for iPhone and iPad

March 29, 2021 by Klaus Crow

Portrait of burning young attractive blond woman playing on electric fire guitar
Once in a while I check if there are any new good and useful guitar apps available. While there’s a lot of baloney out there, sometimes you’ll find some really nice tools that can help you out with your guitar playing. It makes the life of the guitar player easier, more comfortable and increases the progress.

These guitar apps are really cool. They all have an easy interface design that will make you start practicing within a minute.

Here you go:

Riffr
800,000+ Guitar tabs & Chords. Riffr is daily updated with the latest tabs and chords from various guitar websites. Built in Chord Dictionary. Video lessons and audio playback. Just awesome and it’s free!

GuitarTuna
A ridiculously accurate guitar tuner and easy to use. Works for Guitar, Bass, 12-string guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo and other string instruments, and contains most of the alternative tunings too! It also includes ear training practice. Yes it’s free.

iReal Pro
iReal Pro simulates a real-sounding band that can accompany you as you practice, and also lets you collect chord charts from your favorite songs for reference. You can import 1000’s of songs from the forums. Especially if you want to learn to play jazz, this is the bomb. It’s rather expensive for an app, but a must for the jazz student.

Spreadsheets
This isn’t necesarily a guitar app, but I use this app to write down my guitar practice goals. I create my guitar goal lists on the computer in google spreadsheet and when I practice I use my Ipad to check what I need to be practicing, add stuff I need to work on later and keep track of my progress. It’s free.

MTSR
While Garageband can do many things, sometimes I just want to record and export a musical idea. Nothing more nothing less. Multi-Track-Song-Recorder is my savior. It’s an easy to use 4 track recording app. Export your songs via Dropbox, Email, SMS and iTunes File Sharing. Great for musicians. It’s free.

Ear Trainer
Every musician should work on Ear Training (or Aural Training) and Interval Ear Training is a very important element of ear training. You will learn to recognise the relationship between two notes (by distance), when they are played together or apart!

Do you know any cool guitar apps? Please share in the comments.

6 Reasons You Want to Learn the Notes on The Fretboard and How

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

May 14, 2019 by Klaus Crow

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It may seem obvious that when you learn to play guitar you also need to learn the notes on the fretboard. How can you play music without knowing the note names? Well believe it or not, there are a lot of guitar players out there who don’t have the slightest clue what they are playing and they do just fine.

I didn’t know all the notes on the fretboard for a long time either. And yes I could still play all my favorite tunes and improvise over chord progressions. But there were limitations that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Huge limitations!

Once I started learning the notes on the strings and figuring out what the notes of chords, scales and licks were, things started to change. One discovery let to another and a lot of things suddenly made sense and became clearer. My knowledge expanded and my playing improved. I learned all this in small steps. Continue Reading

Extended Chords 9th 11th 13th for Guitar

By Klaus Crow 7 Comments

September 4, 2023 by Klaus Crow

extended chords 9th, 11th, 13th for guitar Extended chords are usually used in jazz music, but also in other styles like pop, blues and latin music to spice up chord progressions and add some nice flavor to the chords.

When I first learned the theory behind extended chords, it opened up a whole new world for me. All these mysterious chord names made finally sense.

I would use the chords for my own material, incorporate them into some of my favorite guitar songs and started learning some wicked jazz tunes.

Once you play around, experiment and incorporate these chords into your playing it will make guitar playing really fun and colorful.

If you’re new to chord construction then first check out How to Use Chord Formulas and Their Benefits and How to Play The Most Common Types of 7th Chords. These posts will give you the basic chord theory you need.

Let’s dive in…

Triads and 7th Chords

Extended chords are the 9th, 11th and 13th chords.

To understand the chord structure of extended chords we must first know the major and minor triad and three types of seventh chords. We use the “C” chord as an example to show the chord names.

10 Tips on How to Make Yourself Play Guitar Everyday

By Klaus Crow 25 Comments

May 14, 2019 by Klaus Crow

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10 tips how to play guitar everyday Most of us would like to play guitar everyday, but the reality is there are so many other things on our todo list we sometimes forget to practice at all.

So I tried a little experiment a few weeks ago. I took a piece of a paper and wrote down the most important scales, songs and exercises I needed to work on.

I placed the notes on the fridge, the toilet and living room walls. It now keeps reminding me of what I need to be practicing even when I’m too busy and get lost in other things.

The fact that I’m constantly reminded, triggers me to pick up my guitar several times a day and just play. That’s what I need.

Along with this effective trick I use some other strategies to make sure there’s nothing in my way. Read and apply them.

Here are 10 tips to get you playing everyday:

And remember The more you practice, the better you get, the more fun it will be!

1 – Unescapable reminders
Place reminders everywhere. Put reminders in your cell phone and your computer calender. Place reminders on the kitchen fridge and the toilet wall. Wherever you spend most of your time you want to put up a reminder that makes you start practicing. Continue Reading