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TIRED OF PLAYING THE SAME, OLD, TIRED CHORD PROGRESSIONS? (review #2)

There’s a lot of ways to practice chord changes, but most of us work on them by playing songs we’ve been trying to master over, and over, and over again. Even after we master them, we often continue repeating these same progressions in the same key in which we first learned them.

Needless to say, this gets boring. It also means we never actually learn how to effortlessly switch between any and all of the chords in our repertoires.

To help keep the fingers nimble, and more importantly, to truly master changing between chords with speed and ease, use this site to help guide your practice.

Autochords provides randomized lists of chord changes in different keys and in different styles. This way, you can practice switching between any number of possible chords while still creating a cohesive, musical sound.

In addition, autochords is great to use if you are playing around with songwriting! By giving example progressions, it allows the songwriter in you to hear the differences between many sets of chord changes in any key -- giving you the opportunity to create music using chords and progressions you may otherwise have never thought to try.

I highly recommend this website to all musicians, not just guitarists. It’s a lot of music theory made simple and digestible to people of all knowledge levels. I use this site fairly regularly, and I suggest you do, too!

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Review: The #1 Guitar App available (and runner-up)

I’ll try to keep this relatively short and sweet, although that is definitely something I’m not so good at.

I’ve spent a lot of time and money in increments of $0.99/$1.99/$2.99+ trying out apps online. Tbh, a lot of that was a waste. But thanks to that, I’ve had the joy and handiness of two apps that were totally worth the cash, and even the wait(s) to find them.

The first one is as handy as a guitar app can possibly be. Despite being one of the most expensive apps I’ve ever bought, it’s still well worth it’s price. The app is the Ultimate-Guitar app. I even recommend getting all of it’s additional packages/add-ons. This app has access to the entire tab database of UG, assuming you have some sort of way to connect to the internet. That’s the very tip of the iceberg in terms of the useful capabilities of this app. The tabs (as well as everything else on it) are formatted specially for phone/tablet use. For instance, the tabs are just the right size for the size of your screen. If you buy access to their Power Tabs, you can also turn on auto-scroll -- a featuring allowing the user to automatically scroll (shocker!)l through tabs at virtually any consistent rate at the click of a button (specifically one click, I mean).This enables you to set down the phone and play a song while it automatically scrolls for you through the tab.

The app allows you to save favorite tabs, print straight off your phone, post new tabs, and has a multitude of features and abilities. For instance, there is a tuner capability within the app, and it comes in a chromatic and manual varieties (chromatic tuners generally have a microphone that picks up what you’re playing and tells you what note it is and whether to tune it higher or lower; a manual tuner has a speaker that plays the note each string ought to be, and you/the user must listen to the difference between it’s pitch and your guitar’s pitch and figure out how to make the two tunes match). There is also a small set of lessons for beginners with practice tabs, and software that tracks how long and on what you’ve practiced and mastered.

I use the UG app just about every time I’m playing guitar, without any hyperbole. It’s the single handiest app I’ve got on my phone. If I were using a star rating system, I’d give it five out of five stars.

And the runner up? It is the Yousician App. (I’ll be sure to be much more brief this time -- I swear.) This app is the last in a long stream of projects trying to bring music education the users from the internet, and make it fun at that. This app is available on most modern-day devices that bring you internet and that have a webcam or microphone hooked up to them. In a almost game-like series of lessons, the user is guided through useful and on-point practices that build to a small test-like portion meant to recap what was learned.

Yousician is useful for students of all ages and levels of any one of a number of instruments who have interest in bettering their knowledge base. To be honest, they accomplish everything they set out to do, and they do it really, really well. I highly recommend this FREE (for about just one lesson a week)(I think? It’s been a bit since I used it) app for, well, everyone.

These two are my favorite apps for guitarists, and they farrrr surpass every other app I’ve tried. I totally recommend them!

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the ABSOLUTE BEST ONLY site you’ll ever need for guitar tabs

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or email zachteachesguitar@gmail.com