More Songwriting Power in Your Pocket

Here are 5 awesome apps that will help your songwriting:

Tuner: play in tune

Metronome: play with good time

Shazam: what’s that song called? who is playing that song?

B-Rhyme: slant rhyme dictionary

GarageBand: multitrack recording in your pocket

This is a follow up article to Songwriting Power in Your Pocket – optimizing your phone for songwriting with on-board apps

Note: All app links go to the Apple App Store, they are not affiliate links, but included for your convenience.

If you have an Android phone, please leave your app recommendations in the comment section at the end of the article to help others 🙂

Tuner

Nothing screams amateur louder than an out of tune guitar 🙁

True story

I was at a songwriting workshop… tuned my guitar, set it down in the case for 10 minutes, picked it up, started to play my song for a songwriting critique. Amateur move, I had to stop after the 1st chorus and retune my low E string. I must have bumped the tuning peg… leaving me with the choice: stop and retune, or keep going (out of tune) and finish the song expecting to get critiqued for being out of tune and not knowing it. Damn! I stopped to retune and destroyed my flow… took 15 seconds to get it back but it felt like an eternity….

Lesson learned:

Always check your tuning. Learn to tune by ear, have a tuner to double check,
Use a clip-on tuner on stage… cut your volume and tune it

Pocket Hz

https://appsto.re/ca/ECxdG.i

Advantages

Clean design, easy to read, no ads
Visual Meter: Green in tune, red not
Pitch and Octave of the note
Hz – pitch, in cycles per second to first decimal, extremely precise
Digital Meter: cents deviation from pitch… precise tuning in the photo, my low E string is -1 cents flat even though the meter reads green in tune

Disadvantages

picks up background sounds, might not work on stage

Bonus with PocketHz

You can play-along with any song in your music library, speed up or slow music (keeps it on pitch), transpose it up or down up to a tone, and select part of a song to loop and practice

Play-along with your favourite musicians

Metronome

A metronome keeps a steady pulse, measured in beats per minute (bpm).

True Story:

I had terrible time when I was working on my first university degree playing saxophone… speed up if it’s easy, slow down when it was harder, didn’t really count, couldn’t sightread because I’d stop after every mistake. Donnie Palmer, my sax teacher, taught me some exercises to properly use a metronome… play songs, play scales, improvise… do it all with a metronome.

Lesson Learned:

If you have solid time, everything else is easier.
Learn to use a metronome… Contact me if you need help with time or metronomes, I can help 🙂

You can use any metronome. The features I look for are:

sounds good (no ugly beeps)
easy to change tempo (no pushing + a hundred times, give me a dial or a slider)
easy to read, no ads (don’t distract me!)

Metronome App

My favourite is called Metronome, but I couldn’t find it in the app store, only for iPhone… not sure if it was discontinued….

Advantages:

Tap entry, a must have feature, tap the tempo of a song into the metronome
38 bpm – 225 bpm, simple dial quickly changes the tempo
Easy to push mute button
Pleasant click instead of a noisy electric beep
Choice of a flash, with or instead of a click, for noisy situations
Looks good, wood finish choices for the skin
No visable ads… Options & Info link to ‘buy a Steinway piano’, another link for iPad sheet music @ etudeapp.com

Disadvantage:

couldn’t find it in the app store after searching for it several times… sorry, you have to find your own metronome 🙂

Action Steps: 5 minutes

Search “metronome”
pick 3 free ones
try for 1 minute each
keep your favourite, delete the rest….

Shazam

https://appsto.re/ca/ZEk_q.i

This app blows my mind… turn it on and it can figure out a song… sometimes in less than 2 bars. An algorithm matches the sounds to a database through the internet.

Awesome even if it only told you the name of the song and artist…