As a guitar wrangler, i feel it incumbent on me to tell you guys and let the folks over at Guitar Toolkit know what a killer app this is.

Now, kids, In the olden days, there were NO guitar tuners except pitchpipes so when electronic tuners hit, it was a revelation! They were the size of a box of Pop Tarts, but we sure were glad to have them. Nowadays we can have tuners right on our phones and we are blown away anew.

You should get the GTK app just for its fine tuner and metronome. Maybe some of you couldn’t care less about the metronome, but as a teacher, I’m pulling it out on my students all the time.But the folks at GTK/Agile Partners have added a bunch of other cool techo-features for us real guitar heads that have me turning to this app again and again, for all kinds of cool reasons.

Guitar Chords

But then it also has a huge catalog of chords! Just dial in the chord you want to play, and it shows it to you, complete with strum so you can hear the difference between a G diminished and a G augmented. It shows you different finger tings for the chords all up the neck. When we re driving, Ill dial up some wacky chord and play it for my husband using the autosttum feature and test his chord knowledge.

AND – here’s one of the real cool parts – there’s a virtual guitar neck where you can add the notes yourself and the app will tell you  what the chord is! No more pulling out the old chord tomes and fumbling between the pages, looking for exactly THAT chord in THAT voicing so you can find out what to call it.

Different Instruments

This is all great for guitar, but the app also provides all these features for other instruments, like uke, 5 string bass, and mandolin. So you can tune your uke, find uke chords, or tune that pesky 12-string. Astoundingly, the tuner will accommodate a capo, a device which, as all seasoned guitar players know, challenges your nicely tuned guitar.

Different Tunings

But GTK doesn’t just off standard turnings! It also offers a million alternate turnings for today’s guitar adventurers! One of my favorite bands, Alter Bridge, plays a lot of songs in Drop C#. I select the tuning I want, and GTK’s tuner adjusts to that tuning. Joy! It has a bunch of different tunings packed in, even one called “Guinevere” so you can play the Dave Crosby song of that name. My people!

Lefty? No worries! Select the Left-handed option and GTK turns everything around for your benefit!

More Guitar Coolness

This is not a complete list of GTK coolness. I need to finish this post!  Suffice it to say that The app shows you a million coolio and utterly outre  scales and arpeggios – Neapolitan Minor? Inverted Augmented? – plus the beloved pentatonics.

This app is super cheap for what it is.  You can buy features in the app like editable, shareable, audible chord sheets, and an advanced metronome with built-in patterns. The app includes chord sheets that you can create AND include audio files and share with others as PDF files.  I haven’t dug into this feature yet but zowie!

Word – get Guitar Toolkit  and you and your guitar are ready for more than anything.