As many home guitarists can attest, Tab is a godsend for learning songs. If you're like me, you've hit up the internet looking for user-generated tablature sheets, paging through variations and permutations of musicians trying to reverse-engineer popular music and posting their results online. There is no standard for the format of these files, nor are they ever complete enough to learn both rhythm guitar, bass or other ensemble parts should your band want to cover any of these songs. So it's in this environment that Agile Partners launched their iOS app, TabToolkit, and completely changed the game.
TabToolkit, with its recent 2.0 release in the App store, is your one-stop shop for sheet music for popular music. Employing an a la carte method, you can browse in the embedded Tab Store and buy the music for individual songs from artists ranging from Blur and the Beach Boys to Wilco and Wham! and a lot of bands in between, crossing nearly all genres of music, offering a few songs from each artist. Each song is $1 and fully licensed by the publishers. You'll find a good mix of music on par with what you'd likely find in your local music store's sheet music racks. It's a good start for the store, offering a breadth of artists which I hope they deepen over time.
The sheet music itself, and the related functions of the Toolkit, are where the app really shines. On the iPad, the screen fills with a gorgeous rendition of tablature notation alongside standard notation. An image of a guitar neck runs along the bottom of the app, and when you tap a chord on the sheet music, the fingerings for that cord will appear on the neck. Press the play button and a MIDI rendition of the entire song will begin with a play head moving through the charts, illuminating the notes and chords as the song plays. It's an extremely effective interface, especially if you're like me and don't read time signature changes or count out beats in your head.
Each song comes with the full complement of charts for the entire arrangement of a song, from guitar to piano, bass, strings, drums, vocals, harmonies, everything. You can select between them and even adjust the volume of each element in the MIDI mix or solo out elements you're trying to learn. As you cycle through the parts – bass, piano, drums, etc. – the instrument representation also changes, giving you an additional visual reference of what to play. You can also loop sections and adjust the playback speed to make learning particularly challenging passages easier.
The app is universal, working on both the iPhone and iPad. While the iPhone version has been resized to work on the device's smaller screen it's as fully functional as the iPad edition. As expected, purchases you make on one device can be restored onto other devices, so you can always have your music library close at hand.
The experience of using TabToolkit was fantastic. It not only brings sheet music into the electronic age, it does so while extending the functionality of that music to genuinely aid in learning music. This is not a glorified PDF reader for sheet music and songs purchased from the store are well worth the money because of their completeness and for the way they are integrated into the application. It's an incredible value, overall.
The app is currently free during this promotional period as the 2.0 version was just launched in the iTunes App store. Grab a download and try out the features in the included sample charts, including Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton, truly a GeekDad favorite.
Wired Convenient integrated store. Fair song price for the features. Amazing feature set to accelerate learning music.
Tired MIDI sounds like you'd expect. Syncing playback with the actual song from your Music App library would be a nice option. Existing Tab Store catalog isn't terribly deep yet.
TabToolkit (iTunes Link)
