Tool: Guitar App

I recently came across a terrific site for guitar players called GuitarApp. The company behind the app is based in Dublin and they have created a collection of wonderful FREE tools to help teachers and students not only learn the guitar, but become more engaged while doing so.

The site is actually a collection of videos, tools, games and resources and I strongly recommend checking it out to anyone learning or teaching the guitar. It also has a very cool YouTube-style video browser built for just guitar players that is broken down into lots of different categories and also has complete courses for guitar players of any experience level.

All of the videos in their amazing browser include loop and slowdown capabilities built right in!  If you look at the image below, you will see the Loop Section and Playback speed functions highlighted with red arrows.  This is a super slick and convenient way to interact with the videos in their library.

The developers behind the GuitarApp have also created three fantastic Chrome browser extensions: a tuner, a metronome, and an interactive chords/scales library.  All you need to do to add these FREE tools is visit the Chrome Web Store and simply click the app you are interested in adding, and then click Add to Chrome.  

The developers behind the app believe that everybody should have free access to the tools they need to learn music. They know that music teachers often have limited budgets and technology “chops” which is why they made all of their web tools free to embed on your website or course with a simple code snippet. Our embeddable metronome, tuner and chord library can be posted to any online learning environment that teachers use with their students, as long as that tool has the ability to embed HTML code.  That means that you can even use the GuitarApp inside of the MusicFirst Classroom!

When you add the embed option to the Chrome extension (widget), you can have your students pull up whatever tool they need in their browser on things like Chromebooks anytime! They just click on the extensions icon in the browser, choose the tool they want to use at that moment, and click out of it when they are finished.

Adding the Guitar Chords Widget from the Extensions panel in Chrome.

I love when companies like GuitarApp provide meaningful and useful tools for music educators and their students. I hope that you’ll check them out and add their software to your teaching!