I have two — two! — pieces of awesome software to showcase today for the iPad. Perhaps you thought the iPad was only good for watching Netflix streaming but now it is made of rock.
TabToolKit by Agile Partners
At first blush you may be all “buh?” But let me tell you the greatness of TabToolKit.
If you’ve played guitar for years… and years… and years… and years… you occasionally open up an old book or an old bag and there, lurking within, is a badly scratched out downloaded from an ASCII document from some repository tab of some guitar song or other you really wanted to learn but all you had was this tab that sort of told you where to put your fingers and not a hell of alot else. You struggled for a while and then gave up. TabToolKit:
1. Organizes your tabs. If anything else, it means no more printing them out, folding them up, or ripping them while trying to play awkwardly on the couch.
2. Displays them in a neat and easy way for practice — especially on an iPad with an easel stand.
3. Uses Guitar Pro tabs which have all the parts to a song, the sheet music, and the tabs so the music-saavy can actually look at notes and go “oh, that is way less difficult than I thought.”
4. Has metronomes, speed up, slow down, looping and repeat features for working on a particular practice.
5. Count in and play at any point in the song.
6. Drop voices in and out.
7. For those wondering how to play said power chords, it highlights where to hold the strings down on the fretboard.
8. And Guitar Pro tabs are extremely plentiful for free.
I love this piece of software. I absolutely love it. I recommend TabToolKit to anyone with a guitar — a beginner, someone looking to improve, someone wanting to carry their collection of tabs around conveniently, anyone. It is squee in a can. It’s iPhone/iPod/iPad — the iPad version is a native, full screen version.
Amplitube for iPad by IK Multimedia
I love the original Amplitube but getting my guitar jacked into my Macbook Pro was always a huge hassle — converter boxes that never worked, feedback noise, weird issues. I ended up with an actual guitar-to-usb cable that lost sound and had high latency but at least worked. Despite this, Amplitube is such a marvelous piece of software it justifies buying a Mac (a Windows version is now available) to complement one’s electric guitar. Who wouldn’t go through the trouble for all those stompboxes, amps and cabs in one place to model any sound, anywhere?
Now I have Amplitube for iPad. Sure it has far fewer stompboxes, amps and cabs then the big software load but what it has is more than enough to model up any sound for any purpose.
1. The iRig dongle works out of the packaging without any software or configuration. Plug guitar into iRig. Plug headphones into iRig. Plug iRig into iPad. Done.
2. Amplitube for iPad (iPhone, iPod) works right out of the box and comes with 12 presets, 11 stomps, 5 amps and 5 cabs for the full ($20) install of the software. The stomps and amps all have little knobs that turn by running a finger along the screen for custom settings. Settings can be saved.
3. The modeling sounds excellent. The latency is low. The feedback is non-existent.
4. Everything sounds better with the Delay pedal which does lock to a BPM. You, too, can sound like a bad Yes knock-off!
I have not played with pulling in my own track and putting effects over it on the fly but this is a supported feature.
It’s just full of squee. Instead of carrying around a Mac and a whole toolbox full of chords and gizmos to get it to work and then not able to get it out to a speaker or an amp all I need is my regular guitar cable, the iRig, headphones and/or output device and the iPad. It sounds fantastic.
For someone who just wants to sit and pick up a guitar and play, and have the guitar sound good through the headphones, this is a must-have. The iRig is $40. The software is either free (Amplitube FREE) with the option to add to it, or $20 for the full build. Everything, yes, is $80 but $80 is the cost of a single, good stompbox*.
So see? The iPad does do things other than just stream videos.
The alternative I recommend for the same price is TabToolKit and a Line6 PocketPOD, but the Amplitube has the visceral feeling of messing with gear where the PocketPOD is dialing to a setting. Not that I don’t love the POD, but I am more likely to have the iPad on me than the PocketPOD.