Tab Toolkit

First off, let's get one thing straight. I hate guitar tab. Why? Several reasons! Tab is transcribed music. Very few tabbers out there actually manage to hear the right notes and hence put them down on paper correctly. Second, the guitar being the beastie that it is, if you want to play any note, or, heaven forbid, a chord you generally have several places you can play it. On top of that a true musician might choose to play the same lick in different spots on a whim! Tabbing all of that accurately isn't easy. Last, but not least, most tab sites on the internet are rife with pop-ups, spyware, viruses etc. Not very healthy places to go surfing! Oh, and just when you find a decent site, they get a take-down order!

So, in my experience, if I've wanted to learn a riff or song it's been quicker to just work it out by ear. As a last resort, I've hunted for tabs... usually finding 'versions' which are clearly less accurate than what I've already come up with.

So, that notwithstanding... I give you TabToolkit... yet another iPhone application. The burning question is: is this something worth having?

My somewhat surprising answer is... yes! I think so. Particularly if you actually like tab.

What does it do? It reads and stores tabs from websites then plays them back through midi, showing you the fingering on a virtual fretboard. My first surprise was that the program works at all, which it does, seamlessly. You can read in tab, select playback speeds, follow the tab itself or the fretboard, swipe to scroll back and forwards... pretty much anything you might want to do.

The other selling point is that it uses tabs in "Power Tab" format, which means multiple instruments can be accessed, including guitar, bass and piano etc. Whilst for a guitarist this may not be too important, but what it means is that the people putting in the effort to make these files seem to go the extra mile and get the transcription better than the scruffy oiks scratching grubby pencil marks across crumpled bits of paper. I won't say that all the tabs I've downloaded have been perfect, but they've been better.

Which brings me to another new discovery, a website called "Tab Library". For those of you who can use Power Tab, it's a pretty decent resource and, apparently, 100% legal! Imagine?!?!

Just Add Water

So, I had Jam #2 with my new "Blues Band" last night. I don't want to blog specifically about the band, other than to say i think session number 2 went really well.

The line-up this time around was two guitars, bass, blues harp and... and... well, that was it. Our drummer was poorly, so the skins just sat there, unbashed.

Now, in my old age I've become something of a technophobe and I don't like to over-complicate things with kit. I'm not terribly keen on computers and I hate mobile phones, social networking and reality TV. On the music front, I don't even like pedals, though after struggling to get a decent sound out of the studio amp last night, I think I might have to consider investing in one. Any suggestions for a (reasonable) blues tone? Anyone? Anyone???

Last night, much to my surprise, technology came to the rescue. Not only that, but it was technology that I've been carrying around in my pocket.

Those initiated into the not-so-secret society of iPhone users will doubtless already be sporting a knowing smile. Drummer not able to turn up? There's an app for that.

More accurately, there were two apps for that. The first one, iDrum, I've mentioned before. iDrum's strength is that in real time you can quickly build up a beat and modify hits whilst it's playing. Last night, iDrum was the app of choice when practicing specific songs.



The second app, which I've not mentioned before, was "Instant Drummer, Heartbreaker" which is a set of acoustic drum samples that you can play back, varying such things as intensity, number of fills etc.



The beauty of Instant Drummer is that, when jamming in 4/4, you can just hit play, set the tempo and you immediately have a 'realistic' sounding drummer. Okay, so the drummer's never going to react to the band and speed up or slow down, but for a practice session, it's good enough.

The downside of both apps is that they don't swing. I'm hoping that the 'blues' edition of Instant Drummer will be more flexible, but for now you're stuck with regular time.

Neither of these apps are any substitute for the real thing, obviously, but for the first time since getting it, I really saw the potential of the iPhone as a usable tool and not just a flashy toy.

MultiTrack For iPhone

I'm curious to know whether this is any good.

Not that long ago I accidentally snapped my old mobile phone in two (yes, really, I'm that hard) and I gave in to the inevitability of eventual iPhone ownership.

The iPhone is a great toy... not a great phone per se...

Anywho, I came across this "app" today. I've seen 4-track recorders on the iPhone before, but never a 16-track. Right now it's a pretty simple program, but it looks like it has potential to be pretty cool. Right now it's just a low-latency recorder with import and export functions, pan, track volume, mute/solo etc. Future enhancements (apparently) include a metronome, effects etc.

I have a number of music apps. Most of them I got for free (usually on sale days). Some are decent. Some not so much. Almost universally, though, the GUI leaves something to be desired in terms of functionality. Because the iPhone screen is so small, most programmers have opted for teeny-tiny buttons which, well... they're fiddly. This one seems to have adopted a more practical approach. Touch a control and it pops up to fill the screen, making fine adjustments easier. Developers... learn from this!!!!

Of the music apps I have, I think the most useful to date has been iDrum, a pocket drum machine. The pros for iDrum are that it's easy to control and it sounds great. The downside is that exporting beats isn't as easy as it should be. As far as I can tell, all you can do is export 40s of a beat via the 'Ringtone Sync' option. So once you've painstakingly generated the drums for a whole song... well, you're f**ked. The only workaround I can think of is to use an audio cable and a desktop recorder on your 'puter to create a 'live' copy.

The other app I like is iSequence. The user-interface on this one is way too small, though. It has loads of sound banks etc, but its biggest failing is that you have to generate chords via individual notes and until the last release there were only 4 tracks... when you have three notes in a chord? Um...

So, I'm curious about MultiTrack. Apparently, it's possible to import drum tracks etc from PC/Mac. I wonder how easy it would be to use this little device to record home demos, or moreover, when not at home, whether it's functional enough to be a decent pocket recorder. Now that winter's well on the way I'm already looking forward to the summertime... I want to be out there in the sun, jamming, writing songs... creating.