Guitar Toolkit review

If you look really hard and have some patience, there are some excellent apps for the iPhone. When first released, I said that what would make it perfect for me would be an SDK for custom apps, and 3G. Now it has both of those things, I'm literally never without mine. I find I'm leaving my laptop at home more and more, and just taking the phone with me. I can keep up with my personal and work email, check my Twitter feed, keep up with friends on Facebook - nearly everything that I routinely use my laptop for. Hell, if there was a mini Aperture so that I could process photos direct from my camera, I could blog in it, too! That would be just a tiny bit awesome.

One app that I got really excited about when it was first release was Guitar Toolkit. This was at a time when I was plaiyng a lot of guitar and the idea of a tuner and chord book really appealed to me. I wasn't expecting much from it, but it was excellent. I could choose from a load of "standard" tunings, as well as open, which just showed the current tone of the note being played. It was pretty accurate, and when compared with my standalone tuner, I couldn't tell the difference and I've got a pretty decent ear.

At the time of the first version, I sent the developers some suggestions for future versions of the app that would make it perfect for me. As far as I can remember, the main thing was just for polish, and that was the notes on the fretboard screen representing the currently selected tuning. Boy did they implement that and more!

Now, as well as open notes, you can show scale positions of every scale I've heard of and some that sound totally fabricated all the way up the fretboard! Furthermore, when you touch the note, it plays the actual note! They listened (when they replied to my first email, they said they were already going to do all of my suggestions, so technically they didn't listen, but I like it better if it was my idea)! The scales also respond to different tunings, which is super useful - that's one thing that always gets me about different tunings.

The current chord book has changed loads. They've added the awesome auto-strum and the position selector. Auto-strum does what it says, when you change to a different position of a chord, it plays that chord at you. Soon I won't even need to have a guitar!

They've also added the Instrument tab. As you can see, you're able to change the type of instrument you're using (oddly enough), whether you're left-handed or not (this flips the fretboard in Chords and Fretboard - silly southpaws!) and your default alternate tuning, which influences the view of the Tuner and the available Fretboard scales.

Lastly, they've quite substantially changed the metronome. I'm not a huge user of metronomes, so I'm not really sure what most people look for in this, but you now have tonnes of new metronome-related options. If you're distracted by sounds, you can choose a flash instead. There are new sound effects and time signatures which, when added to the tap pad, make what I see to be a very full-featured metronome.

Needless to say, I see this as a must-have application for guitarist iPhone owners. As well as being brilliant at everything it attempts, it's stable and incredibly reasonably priced (£5.99) with regular updates that have been free so far. In honesty, I'd be happy to pay even if they charged!