March 29, 2021 by Klaus Crow
Every now and then I’m on the look out for new handy tools online that makes the life of a guitar player easier, more efficient, effective and more comfortable.
Guitar playing and the stuff that comes with it like backing up your audiofiles, writing down your lyrics and music becomes even more enjoyable if you got the right tools for the job.
Or some nice blues backingtracks to improvise over. It makes practicing a hell of a lot more fun.
Let’s take a look at these guitar productivity tools:
– Blanksheetmusic.net Notation sheets for every instrument and vocals
– www.guitarvoice.com Awesome guitar backingtracks. Search by artist, random or genre.
– Crashplan.com Unlimited Online backup storage for all your precious audio files and everything else for only $3 a month
– Audio.online-convert.com Online audio/video/ebook converter
– Spotify is a really good sounding/looking Online Social Music Streaming Tool next to, Last.fm and Soundcloud
– Audio speed tempo pitch changer (reducing audiospeed while remaining pitch and vice versa)
for Windows: Windows Media Player 12
for Mac: Audiolobe
– Masterwriter.com Songwriter tool used by famous artists and producers including Rob Thomas and David Foster.
– The 150 Essential Chords Ebook I would be a fool not to recommend my own 150 Essential Chord Ebook. A good organized, categorized and easy to read chord book with a nice layout. Free to download.
– Reading sheet music:
A short version:www.musictheory.net
An extended version: www.readsheetmusic.info
– More Tools 21-must-have-online-musician-tools-for-guitar-players
If you know some cool guitar productivity tools, please share it in the comments.
I appreciate it.
Klaus Crow
Ooh, I’m going to check out guitarvoice!
It’s not exactly guitar specific, but I’ve been successfully using EarMaster for ear training. It took only 15 minutes a day for a few months and I now can identify all intervals through one octave. Now I’m working on chords.
I’ve also been checking out Songsterr which has an easy interface to learn songs with tab. It also includes rhythm notation, a stripped down mixer, and the ability to slow tempo.
I also heard about Amazing Slow Downer for tempo slowing with no pitch loss, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
That’s a good list, thanks!
I’ve been using Neck Diagrams (www.neckdiagrams.com) a lot recently to create nice chord charts. Available for Mac and PC, pretty handy if you ask me.
I like the website of David Southwick on guitar chord theory. Concise and easy to understand. I use the guitartabs.com site a lot, although not always correct. Your own site is very good.
I learned to play guitar with an old nice Russian teacher in the 60:ies.
My mother had been obliged to play the piano as young and did not like it. As I had 6 in song in school and quite obviously was quite unmusical I was about 30 years old when I built an almost playable 4 string guitar. Then I bought a cheap real guitar and then a nice one that I still like best.
My teacher had me to play from note sheets.
I really love to play Russian folk and trad. on my guitar. They have beautiful music over there.
When the playing of the guitar went beyond the first 5 sections of the guitar I gave up the teacher. Had work to do also. But still, since then I have been picking melodies on the guitar from note sheet inside my own very narrow limits of musicality. (Remember only 6 of possible ten in school!)
Some 6 years ago I wanted to play something more like violin or cello and bought a used learners Bayan i Jalta for 100 euros. A fine instrument.
Since then I have been learning to play the Bayan at different courses, starting at the age of about 70. I have learned quite something, though the basses are still difficult. Always the teaching is based on the “dots”.
In Ireland the seem to hate the “dots”. They learn music by listening in Slow Sessions. The leader plays a part of the piece and then the pupils play after. Note sheets are strongly forbidden. When they have learned enough they advance to real Sessions.
Last spring I decided to try to learn playing without the “dots”.
Most of the summer I usually sat by the sea and played the Bayan quite freely. Mostly improvising, but now and then a known melody jumped out by itself. If nothing else was worth while, then at least my technique improved quite a lot.
From december 2012 I made a computer program to get a home version of Slow session.
I used melodies I had in NWC format and changed them to midi.
Then I chopped them in smaller and bigger pieces.
Like:
Whole piece
Small piece
2 small pieces combined
4 small pieces combined etc.
These I can play on the computer in ordered or unordered and then play them myself after.
I sit i my nice chair and play mostly with a harmonica and learn to listen. If nothing else I have learned to listen and play harmonica, and that is something anyway.
Instead of a computer program you can use e.g. the Van Basco Karaoke program to listen and play and listen to the pieces.
Of course midi, and especially simple midi, is not very flexible musically, but when you are repeating the music you can add your own musicality when you are playing for yourself. After all, also the note sheets are also just a skeleton of the real music that they are picturing.
Sorry, this is not very much about guitar but anyways…
I have liked quite a lot of the blogs in this site.