Master the Modes strives to close that gap by giving you some intro material to each of the modes. It includes an ebook, as well as some jam tracks, so you can play around and explore the characteristic sounds of each mode.

The approach is simple. After some introductory material on the mode in the ebook, you are encouraged to listen to an intro track – which is a slower track featuring a guitar solo in the selected mode. You can then listen to another version of that track without the guitar solo, so you can experiment yourself. There are also two versions – with and without guitar – of a more sophisticated track, so you can further explore on your own. Lastly, there’s an audio track called “Master Class with Rob” which goes through some more concepts related to modes and intervals.

I’d like this product a lot more if it was called, “Introduction to the Modes,” because while the material it contains is quite good, it is still very basic. The notion that you can “master” a mode with a couple of pages of information and two jam tracks is absurd on its face, particularly when some of the information included in the ebook is somewhat simplistic. For example, they trivialize the various modes as being light or dark primarily as a function of the number of sharps or flats in each mode – more flats equals darker, more sharps equals brighter.

But the differences between modes are far more subtle and sophisticated than that – to call Lydian a brighter version of the major scale is an oversimplification, and not a very useful one at that, since many find Lydian to be less saccharine than the major scale.

The authors make a big deal out of the idea of teaching all the modes with the same root (eg, C Lydian, C Dorian, C Ionian etc) instead of teaching them all from the same notes (eg C Dorian, D Ionian, E Phrygian) and there’s certainly nothing wrong with this approach, although I wish they wouldn’t act as if it was such a revolutionary idea – this is how many people learn modes.

One of the big questions is, for $20 is this is a very reasonable way to start learning about modes? In my opinion, the answer to that question is a qualified yes. While I do think this is a good introduction to modes, and the jam-track based approach will make it accessible to many players, there is far more information available in other, similarly-priced products (for example, Don Latarski’s “Practical Theory for Guitar,” which covers the modes, and much much more, for under $30). By the time you’ve played the jam tracks, and maybe listened to the other songs they mention in each mode (which you have to find recordings of on your own), you will have the slight taste of what each mode is. Not a lot more.

The traditional advice about modes has been to learn a little bit about them all, and then pick two, and really try to master those two. I think that advice would be well served here. Use this booklet to learn a bit about modes, to get oriented, and to discover what you really want to dig into. But when you’ve decided what modes you want to master, just know that you’re going to have to go much, much deeper than this product can take you if you really want to Master the Modes.

Click Here To Try Master the Modes

What’s not to like? Unfortunately, quite a bit.

The tuner simply doesn’t work accurately. The needle frequently lands on the wrong note, and it’s so far off that, even in chromatic mode, it’s not clear which way you should tune the string to get it right. I repeatedly compared what the tuner showed on this application to the tuner on Guitar Toolkit, as well as my piezo-based headstock tuner, and while the other two consistently agreed, the Gibson tuner was all over the map (frequently telling me that my low ‘E’ string was an out-of-tune B, for example.)

Furthermore, the tuner on this app doesn’t suspend sleep, which means you have to keep futzing with it to prevent your iPhone from going to sleep mid-tune.

The metronome is simple and works well, but the tap tempo feature on Guitar Toolkit’s makes this one seem lacking in comparison. The implementation is simply klutzy. You have to stop the metronome, tap in your tempo, and then restart it – and then it still delays for a moment, giving you the old tempo for a beat or two. Perhaps this would work better on latest-generation hardware, but the same feature in Guitar Toolkit works fine on a all iPhones.

The chord chart covers so few chords to really be useful. You’ll look in vain for diminished, augmented, or interesting extended chords – you know, the kind of stuff you might actually need to look up on a chord chart.

The real reason for the existence of this app is the Lessons tab that contain a few “previews” that Gibson has chosen to offer of the Gibson Learn and Master Guitar course. This is basically the real point of this app, and the reason it’s free: this app is basically an advertisement for their instructional DVDs.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a more serious guitar iPhone app, I would probably look at Guitar Toolkit instead. It basically has better implementations of all the functions of the Gibson Learn and Master Guitar app. However, if you are just looking for something free to play around with, then go ahead and check out this app.

Gibson Learn and Master Guitar App

If you’re not familiar with the gameplay basics at all, it’s pretty simple: colored dots come down a virtual fretboard in time with the music, and you have to tap them right as they hit the end of the fretboard. If you do this, a song plays perfectly in the background. If you don’t, the guitar sound in the recorded track cuts in and out, and you’ll hear virtual boos from the crowd listening to your show.

Guitar Rock Tour is a solid implementation of this concept. There’s an excellent selection of tracks (including “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” “Heart Shaped Box,” and “Message in a Bottle”) and three difficulty levels. The graphics are solid, and the songs sound good – so long as you hit the buttons on time. You can play as either a drummer or a guitarist.

Nevertheless, I find the game a little wanting. What makes the original Guitar Hero, and Rock Band work so well, in my opinion, is their function as social games. You get a bunch of friends together, grab some chips and beer, and hang out and play. On an iPhone, obviously, that social element is gone, so what’s left is a fairly straightforward tapping exercise.

I also haven’t found any version of this game – on any platform – that really felt like it got the feel of being a guitarist right. Something about the interplay of the notes on the screen and the beat of the music, which Guitar Rock Tour gets very close, but doesn’t quite nail. Perhaps it’s just that, for me, playing rock music isn’t about playing every note at a precisely indicated time, but rather it’s about feeling the groove and working with it. Sometimes you lead the beat, sometimes to trail it, sometimes you hit the strings a little harder.

All of those nuances, of course, don’t exist in any version of this concept, so it’s hard to criticize Guitar Rock Tour for not having them. They key is, of course, to remember that this is a game, not a guitar simulation, and to have fun with it. And as a game, I’ll happily play it with friends and have a good time doing it.

But solo? I’d rather go work on “Message in Bottle” on my guitar, instead. However, if you want a solid implementation of the Guitar Hero idea for the iPhone with some great available tracks, then it’s worth checking out.

Click Here To Try Guitar Rock Tour

For any song with an available .gp5 file, Tab Toolkit will play a midi rendition of the song for you while displaying both animated tablature and traditional music notation. The song will scroll, keeping the current note at the left edge of the screen giving you the maximum amount of run to look ahead. You can adjust playback speed, and for songs with multiple tracks, you can adjust which one is shown.

If your experience with tabs is limited to text files found on the web, you are in for a fantastic surprise. Automated guitar tab files are a fantastic learning tool – often more useful than instructional videos.

The application can also display text files, and does an admirable job extracting tab, chord, and lyric information from web pages, although, of course, you don’t get automated playback with these files.

For songs where you have a .gp5 file available, and many are freely available online, Tab Toolkit is a fantastic implementation of a very useful set of tools. It’s intuitive and straightforward, allowing you to focus on the music, rather than worry about the details of the app itself. It features Agile Partner’s typical attention to detail, such as turning off the iPhone’s sleep during playback – the sort of thing which seems straightforward but, ultimately, so many developers ignore.

Additional details include the ability to change instrument voicings, touch-to-pause, choice or portrait or landscape orientation, and a customizable metronome.

That being said, there is one major caveat about this application, which can’t be ignored. The reality is that an iPhone is a very small screen for this sort of task. To be able to see it while playing a guitar will be a challenge. Therefore, this application feels like it would be a better choice for an iPad than an iPhone. With an iPad and stand, this is an almost perfect tab-playback tool, and thus highly recommended even at the high (for an app) cost of $9.99. For iPhone-only owners, it’s not quite as natural a fit but if you want automated tab playback on your iPhone, and can find a way to place the screen a comfortable music-reading distance away while you play, Tab Toolkit is definitely a worthy purchase.

Click Here To Try Tab Toolkit

The engine behind this app is very powerful. You’re not limited to basic chords – in fact, you can tell it to play pretty much anything, and label it however you want. So if the song you want includes a tricky chord (one of my favorite songs includes an FMaj7add9) you’re not out of luck, you can just program it in, assign it to a button, and voila! And since you can select chords based on what frets to push down on what strings, you’re not limited by your knowledge (or lack thereof) of complex chord construction.

The application ships with several recognizable songs, and they do a good job demonstrating the power of this application. I was able to bash out a halfway decent rendition of “House of the Rising Sun” using their chords, and even strumming the chords to “Stairway to Heaven” sounded right.

With Guitar Studio, you can create and save your own songs easily, as well. The process is very intuitive, allowing you to focus your energy on creating music rather than battling the limitations inherent in an iPhone application.

The creators of Guitar Studio deserve a lot of credit, furthermore, for recognizing that virtual fretboards, where you hold your fingers down over the fret to get the note, just don’t work on an iPhone because of the lack of tactile feedback. The customizable-button approach used by this app is much stronger, and makes this one of the few – perhaps the only – virtual guitar applications I’ve seen which could actually be used to create music.

There are limitations, of course. You’re limited to 10 chords per song. And it really doesn’t have much to do with the experience of playing a guitar, which is why Guitar Studio ends up feeling a little gimmicky. Nevertheless, this guitar iPhone app is, on a certain level, the real deal: it’s a tool you can use to create guitar-like music on your iPhone, and that easily makes it worth $4.99 price tag.

Click Here To Try Guitar Studio

There are two problems, however. One is minor. The other is, unfortunately fatal.

The minor problem is a simple one of organization. You get a lesson list, but if you want to see the video, or hear what it’s supposed to sound like, you don’t click on the “lesson” – rather, you click on the little “info” tab next to the lesson. This is a rather significant annoyance as you end up navigating back and forth to the home screen for a single lesson.

Ultimately, though, that would be forgivable if the concept of TouchChords wasn’t fundamentally flawed. And that fundamental flaw is so deeply wedded to the functionality of this app that, ultimately, it’s not fixable. It’s a flaw in concept.

You see, the way this app works is by asking you to put your fingers over a virtual fretboard on the assigned spots, making a chord. Then it plays the sound of that chord. The idea is that you will learn the finger positions for chords, which you can then transfer to a real guitar.

However, it really doesn’t work that way. Ultimately, playing a guitar is a tactile thing. Yes, when you are learning you will be peering over the edge of the fretboard, trying to line your fingers up right. At the same time, you are getting constant feedback from the pressure of your fingers on the strings. You know if you’re slightly off-center because you won’t be able to hold the string down. You’ll be able to align your fingers with the frets, getting more tactile feedback.

But with TouchChords, relying on a touch screen, provides zero tactile feedback. WIthout the actual need to press strings down, you’re not developing the muscle memory required to be able to play chords smoothly. Furthermore, since you’re not strumming, you’re not working on the coordination between your right and left hands, bringing it all together.

I’m sure the creators of this app would say that most of that is irrelevant – this is about just learning the chord shapes. But ultimately, that’s missing the point because you’re not learning the chord shapes if you’re not feeling them.

Furthermore, you could easily be developing bad habits, since the chord sounds regardless of how your fingers press on the virtual strings. The real challenge for most beginners isn’t learning the chord shapes – you’ll learn them in a few minutes – it’s the coordination of getting your hand into the chord shape quickly, while putting the appropriate amount of pressure on the strings in the right direction. TouchChords Premium does nothing to help you with that.

At $2.99, it’s inexpensive, but despite the programmer’s obvious good intentions, not worth it.

Click Here To Try TouchChords Premium

The sound can further be modified with a variety of effects like chorus, delay, or auto-wah.

It’s difficult to know how to review PocketGuitar, because, to be honest, it’s a gimmick. It’s cute. You can strum a few chords, but actually trying to play a song on it is next to impossible, because the iPhone’s flat screen and the absence of any tactile feedback makes it very hard to tell what strings you have fretted.

PocketGuitar does light up strings up to the fretted note, to show you where it thinks you’re holding it down, but, really, that’s not enough. Even experienced guitar players will struggle to get their fingers to land where they want them without strings to feel.

Wondering if the small screen was part of the issue, I experimented with the bass setting. While I was able to clumsily pluck out a few recognizable basslines, it was simply not worthwhile way to create music. It’s too clumsy and awkward. It might be easier to pluck on the specific notes you want on an ipad, but, of course, you could never hold an ipad like a guitar’s neck and wrap your fingers around it.

There were some frustrating limitations, as well, which suggest that the application was not written by guitarists. For example, you can’t barre strings. A lot of guitarists, for example, will play an A Major chord by holding down the second fret on the B, G, and D strings with their forefinger. Trying this on PocketGuitar gives you only a single fretted note, and two other open strings. Which note does PocketGuitar think you’re trying to play? It seemed random.

Ultimately, PocketGuitar felt like a gimmick to me. As a gimmick it’s fun, but since it doesn’t have much in the way of real utility and it strikes me as something that should probably be a free app, rather than an even-$.99 paid one.

Click Here To Try Pocket Guitar

The biggest problem with this application is that, quite simply, there are better implementations of the same idea elsewhere. ChordMaster does the same thing, with a better implementation and more chords – for only $.99. Guitar Toolkit also includes similar functionality, with more chords, although it’s more expensive (as it includes a tuner, scale charts, and more).

It’s hard to argue that this 7Chords isn’t worth $1.99, but in practical terms it has no advantages over the cheaper ChordMaster. Some might prefer the chart-based chord diagrams, rather than graphics of guitar neck, and the interface is a little cleaner.

However, finding the chord you want is much more tedious, compared to ChordMaster, because it uses only two scroll wheels – one for root, and the other for chord type. You will often find yourself wondering if the augmented chords are before or after the diminished, and, let’s face it, in any situation where you’d need this app you’d want to find what you need quickly and easily. ChordMaster’s wheel-and-button approach is much more sophisticated, yet just as easy to use.

Nevertheless, an app like 7Chords is invaluable, and should be on every developing guitarist’s iphone.

Click Here To Try 7Chords

What really elevates this app compared to a variety of similar apps out there is the interface. The application cleverly uses a combination of easy-to-manipulate scroll wheels for root note and extensions, while a series of buttons select major, minor, augmented, or diminished. Another pair of buttons move up and down the neck of the guitar.

ChordMaster is made by Planet Waves, a company which is known for a lot of entry- and mid-level guitar gear. (They’re the same company that makes D’addario strings, which just about everyone has used at one time or another). And at only 99 cents, it is an easy, cheap purchase.

The only argument against getting this app might be if you already have Guitar Toolkit, which is a $10 app that also includes a chord chart. Unlike with most other guitar apps I’ve seen, I feel like it’s possible to argue that Chord Master’s implementation is actually more intuitive and thorough than Guitar Toolkit’s, although, of course, Guitar Toolkit has many more useful features. Which interface is better for studying chords will be a matter of personal taste.

Every guitarist, sooner or later, runs into a situation where they need to play a chord they don’t know. Obviously, there’s no substitute, in the long run, for understanding chord construction and being able to figure it out on your own. In the short run, however, an application like ChordMaster can be invaluable, saving you time and effort, or preventing you from having to “fake it” by skipping a couple of the extensions in a complex chord. At .99, this guitar app is easy to recommend.

Click Here To Try Chord Master

Scale Wizard demonstrates impressive attention to detail. Root notes are marked in a darker color, making them easy to find. The list of scales and modes is impressive, including some scales many guitarists will never have heard of like the dominant pentatonic and Minor Hexatonic. No, I didn’t know what those were, either, although it must be said that the Guitar Toolkit iPhone app is still the gold standard in this area, with even more scales.

The app works nicely in either landscape or portrait orientation. The only real knock I had on this app was that on a first-generation iphone, the swipe-to-play feature was a little sluggish. I’m not sure if this would be a problem on newer devices.

At only 99 cents, this is Scale Wizard is a pretty easy purchase if you want an app to cover scales. The real question becomes is if an app is particularly useful, although, for that price, it doesn’t require a whole ton of utility to be a worthwhile purchase. As a reference, it’s definitely useful, but if you’re actually trying to learn scales you might want for a bigger screen. Therefore, this app would be more useful for iPad owners than for those of us with iPhones.

Click Here To Try Scale Wizard