SOFTWARE

If you've got a tablet or a smartphone, there's lots of software to help you. Here's a selection...

These resources are for use by the members of the Roydon Strings Groups.

Print a single copy for yourself or read it directly from your computer or tablet.

If you own a tablet you may use it at the meeting - please ask for the wifi code.

Please do not distribute this material outside the Roydon Strings Groups.

Guitar Toolkit. If you're going to get just one paid-for app, get this one. It's not just for guitar: it has ukulele and mandolin sections. It's a really good tunerr, metronome, chord library, chord progression library and much, much more. It's about £8.

If you go to the app store for either Apple or Android and enter a guitar manufacter's name in the search pane, chances are you'll find something. Usually it's a free tuner, but they're usually very good.

There are numerous tuners for guitar and ukulele. Most are free and are perfectly adequate if you don't mind the odd advert popping up.

As with tuners, there are any number of metronomes and beat builders. Most are free.

The music I provide is always as a pdf (portable document format) and you can read the music from a variety of free readers like Adobe Acrobat and DropBox. Onsong (about £15) has the benefit of being able to automatically scroll music so you don't need to keep turning pages. The music I produce is generally in the required 'linear' format (you don't have to go backwards for chorus repeats). You can also connect a wireless foot pedal to scroll the music a page at a time. PowerMusic Reader is free and not only can you connect a foot pedal, you can connect lots of devices to one pedal meaning you don't have to turn the page yourself.

If you are looking for a song to play, Tab Toolkit is excellect. I've found that some of the tabs may require some tweaking - anything from a chord in (slightly) the wrong place to a major re-write. But this free app has a huge library of songs and includes other features like tuner, chord library and metronome.

You'll need some hardware to use this AmpliTube (available via the app) but it enables your tablet to work like a sound effects consol.

If you want to write music (ie on a 5 bar stave), this free editor for PC and Mac is excellect. Not quite as good as Sibelius (which costs £550), but MuseScore is £550 cheaper!