Agile Partners, best known for creating an exceptionally useful $9.99 iPhone application called Guitar Toolkit that packs in a guitar tuner, a metronome, and fantastically detailed chord and scale charts, on Monday released its first follow-up app.
Tab Toolkit, also available via Apple's App Store for $9.99, enables users to read and listen to real-time synthesized versions of guitar tablature charts on their iPhone or iPod Touch.
Here's Kirk Hammett's guitar solo from "Master of Puppets," displayed in tablature and regular notation on an iPhone with Tab Toolkit. Hit "play," and it'll scroll by in (very fast) real time, with a synthesized version playing through the headphones.
Tab Toolkit won't have as large an audience as Guitar Toolkit, which is immediately useful to players of all levels, as it assumes that you have (or can get) tab charts--and that you know how to read them. But if you're a serious guitarist, $9.99 is a fair deal for a very sophisticated app that performs well--no freezes or stutters, as I've experienced with some other music-oriented apps. (If you're just learning about tablature, the $2.99 iPractice is probably a better first download.)
So where do you get tab files? If you're a songwriter, you can use Power Tab Editor (freeware, Windows-only) or Guitar Pro ($59, for Macs and Windows PCs) to create your own. There are also online libraries of tab files for popular songs and artists--GProTab has a particularly extensive collection of Guitar Pro files--though copyright holders periodically crack down on these sites, which generally operate outside their approval.
Once you have some tab files on your computer, Tab Toolkit lets you transfer them to your iPhone directly over your home wireless network. It also includes an embedded version of Safari so you can download tabs directly from the Web. Tab Toolkit does support PDF and rich-text tabs, but you get the most results if you use PowerTab or Guitar Pro files.
At last, once you have some PowerTab or Guitar Pro files on your iPhone, the fun begins. Tab Toolkit scrolls through the song at the correct tempo, displaying both traditional and tab notation, with a metronome and synthesized version of the instrument to keep you on target. It fully supports multitrack tabs for the same song--for example, I was able to download all three guitar parts, bass, and drums for Metallica's "Master of Puppets," and follow through each individually--and you can stop the automated playback and scroll through the chart manually to learn particularly tricky parts like Kirk Hammett's guitar solo. You can display either a guitar fretboard or piano keyboard on the screen to help you with fingering, and can even flip the guitar upside-down if you're a lefty.
Sure, rocker Trent Reznor's example has encouraged plenty of music acts to reject the label system and search for a new industry paradigm using the Web.
Lars Ulrich suggests that Metallica may want to dump its label, and he wants Trent Reznor's help to do it.
(Credit: The Los Angeles Times)But did anyone expect that among Reznor's disciples would be Lars Ulrich?
Ulrich, a member of the rock band Metallica and once one of the leading critics of peer-to-peer sites, said during an interview last week with The Los Angeles Times that Metallica no longer needs the backing of a big record company and suggested that the group may be ready to go independent.
"The primary--not the only, but the primary--function of a record label is to act as a bank," Ulrich told the Times. "When you're fortunate enough to be successful and so on, you don't need to rely on record companies as the banks...We're doing a bunch of shows with Trent this summer in Europe. I look forward to sitting down and talking to him about what's on his radar."
Because of Reznor and efforts by Radiohead, which also dropped its label and has since used the Internet to market itself directly to fans, Ulrich told the Times "there's nothing but possibilities."
What's the significance here? To many music fans Ulrich became the hated symbol of anti-innovation, anti-technology, and heavy-handed copyright owners when he was among those who tried to sue Napster--and indeed file sharing--out of existence.
Now, a decade later, even he wants to sit at the feet of Reznor.
Reznor, leader of the band Nine Inch Nails, has won accolades from digital-music fans for attempting to make music more affordable for the public while helping artists earn a living. He's done this by rejecting the major-label system and distributing music via the Web directly to the public.
Ulrich's nod to Reznor is, at the very least, an acknowledgment that digital distribution is here to stay and that the best way to survive as a music act is to understand it.
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