Guitar Machine – SteamPunk Guitar Tools review

C3 Sotware’s Guitar Machine – SteamPunk Guitar Tools is a new feature packed iPhone app that lets you tune your guitar and even adds a metronome and some additional tools for finding and learning guitar chords. Historically, Guitar Tuner iPhone apps have not been knocking it out of the park. There have been some expensive apps that include guitar tuners like AmpliTube and ClearTune also does a good job. Now with Guitar Machine you get a 99cent app that does everything you need with style, works like a charm, plus additional value added functions.

The app’s 5 tabs are: Auto Tuner, String Tuner, Metronome, Chords, Chord Finder.

Auto Tuner – this brings the classic chromatic guitar tuner on your iPhone. Just strum your strings one at a time and adjust your sound until the matching letters light up in the provided gauge. Tap the T button to change your tuning to a bunch of settings provided including, Standard, Dropped, Open, Lower, Higher, and Misc. The on-screen dial works smoothly and looks solid. As always, you have to do your tuning in a very quiet environment to avoid background noise, and it helps if you keep your iPhone near your guitar.

String Tuner – Sort of like a digital pitch-pipe, this area shows you the 6 strings and tapping them plays the perfect sound for you to tune or test your guitar against by ear. You can again change your tuning from a list of options.

Metronome – Using a beautiful dial control, you can adjust the BPM to your taste from 30 to 300. The metronome has settings for changing the instrument sound. Pick either the basic Metronome sound, or choose Apple Classic, Hihat, LM1 Hihat, Conga, Clappy, Kick & Snare, and ElectroKick. For even more control you can change the time signature to any one of the basic measures like 2/4, 5/4, 2+2+1/4, 3+3+2+2+2/8 etc.

Chords – Simple and powerful, this section shows a select box for choosing the chord and a guitar neck that updates to show the matching tabbed nots for the chords.

Chord Finder – This is a pretty original feature that I haven’t seen in an iPhone app before. A scrollable guitar neck provides all 19 frets and 6 strings for you to tap and pick notes on. Just tap any 2 or more notes and Guitar Machine finds and shows you a list of chords that match those notes, including inversions.

Overall, if you need a kick ass guitar tuner for your iPhone without breaking the bank, Guitar Machine will do the trick. The graphics and layout are amazingly clean and navigation around couldn’t be easier. Use it to also discover new chords and keep timing while you play with the built in metronome.

AppSafari Rating: 4.5/5

AppSafari review of Guitar Machine – SteamPunk Guitar Tools was written by Joe Seifi on December 27th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Music, Utilities. Page viewed 6251 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.