Just curious what apps people are using in relation to bass playing. Here are the ones I currently have.
gStrings - Tuner. I have physical tuners, but I have this as a backup in case I forget to bring one or something. Downside of tuner apps is that they listen through the mic, so you need to be in a relatively quiet place for them to work properly.
Complete Music Reading Trainer - This app is for practicing your sheet music reading and working towards sight reading. Has some lessons and an arcade mode. To access the bass clef in arcade you need to pay though, but it’s not much money. Worth doing the free bass clef lessons even if you don’t do the arcade bit. They have a mini-arcade section with 64 notes.
Flat - This is a music composition tool. Very easy to use and you can enter notes as sheet music or tab. I use this on the desktop too. It’s what I made that 12-bar blues song in another post in.
Songsterr - Has good tab for tons of songs. Free to use, but paying will let you do a few more features, like changing tempo, repeating certain sections, etc. Have used this if someone in a jam wants to do a cover that I’m not familiar with.
Pro Metronome - Decent free metronome. Not much more to say on this one.
BB Forum - Quick access to this forum so I can spam more messages.
What do others use? BTW, all of the above work in Android. Not sure about iOS. Probably good to specify whether you are iOS or Android if you recommend others apps.
BTW, there is also a Complete Ear Trainer app that I have installed to practice audio note recognition, but I haven’t used that one much, so haven’t included it in my list. Same company as Complete Music Reading Trainer.
My main instrument is sax, bass is a new hobby, but I come with a LOT of apps…hahaha.
TE Tuner is my main tuner/metronome, but mostly because it has a feedback drone tone that let’s me dial in intonation on my saxes.
Drum Genius is what I use for drum loops, or, if I am just sick of the metronome and want something funkier, bluesier, jazzier, rockier, etc.
iReal Pro - for lots of backing tracks with chord changes, fun to play along too.
Anytune Pro+ - let’s you import music and slow it down (or speed it up), so you can learn with a song SLOWLY, then ramp up the speed. Also GREAT for transcribing by ear.
Music Memos - for recording small snippets. I like it better than the voice memo in the iPhone.
For my iPad Pro…Notion, a sheet music writing app. What is cool about this on the iPad Pro is you can write out music with the Apple Pencil and it magically transformed to typed notation, it is awesome!
forScore - I am using this to collect all my PDF files of music and have in one place.
Just stumbled across Loopz for Android. Very simple repeating drumlines to play along to. I’ll probably get the premium version because it can automatically increase the tempo, which is great for practicing. The basic version is great too though and not laden with ads and such like other apps.
Hmmm… I definitely have it and use it all the time. Here’s a screenshot of the app details. However, when I click on the store page in the app details it says it can’t be found. Strange. I’ll look into it more in a bit.
It’s installed on my phone. It runs fine. It says it installed it from the Play Store.
However, when I click to see it on the Play Store it says page not found. In the Play Store under My Apps and Installed and Library it isn’t in either list. I thought maybe it was just a bookmark, but it does appear to be a genuine app. There is no address bar, etc. when it is open. If I pause it and try to go to the forums in my browser, I get an error message and the forums won’t load. So it has installed some sort of auto-open into Chrome for the BB Forums.
I think the “BB Forum” app is really just a chrome shortcut link that looks like an app (ok Android, at least). Works like a browser that only shows the one website - which may hook into discourse (which is what I’m assuming this forum is run on).
For example, when I have this “app” open, and swipe down for notification s I can see it’s got a chrome icon associated with it
Apparently it’s not quite an app and not quite a shortcut.
They’re called “Chrome App Install Banners” which create a home screen shortcut on your device without all usual browser fluff (Like in JT’s screenshot, above). Nifty.
The best option I’ve found for a forum app on iOS (that home screen feature doesn’t seem to pop up on my iPhone) is to use the Discourse Hub app (Discourse is the forum platform we use) -
For iOS -
I use the Yamaha Chord Tracker app. It will scan any song on your phone and tell you all the chord changes. It’s an easy way to start playing along with anything.
