Killer app

I still haven't downloaded Beatmaker yet due to the enormous price of £10.99. The best app I have found thus far however is Guitar toolkit. It costs £5.99 but it's an absolute bargain for what you get.

I firmly believe that any guitar player with an iPhone or, like me, a second generation iPod touch (you need the headphones with a mic for one part of it if you have the iPod touch.) Basicalluy it's just about everything you could ever need which can be produced digitally. Firstly you can shoose whether you want to use it for a six string, a twelve string, a bass or a five string bass, although you can change this at any stage. Once you have selected your instrument there is a chromatic tuner which will not only flag up standard tuning but also 35 alternate tunings. There is a metronome with pretty much every time signature to select from. There is a chord database with hundreds of chords each shown in up to six fretboard positions, or voicings, which you can strum on screen to hear how the chord should sound. Finally there is a feature, shown here, called fretboard. You can click the info button near the bottom and select any key then chose from a ridiculous selection of scales, not just the standard western ones but all sorts of unusual asian, african and european scales. When you have chosen a scale you can also choose whether you want to display it in standard tuning or an alternate tuning chosen elsewhere. It will then show you the positions of every note in that scale right the way up the fretboard, as demonstrated here. In this mode you can tap any note to hear how it sounds.

Amazing! I'm absolutely staggered by just how much functionality you get for £5.99.

And if G, or for that matter Joe is reading I'd assume with all the alternate tunings that are there you'd be able to use teh bass setting to get the same functionality for a Uke.