I recently picked up a new M1 MacBook Air, and the first thing I did when I booted up the laptop for the first time was install my essential music and guitar apps. The apps run the gamut from transcribing software, to streaming services, media players and more.
Most of these apps are for Mac, and some can be installed on Windows as well. These apps have served me well for many years, and would make any musician’s life better.
As a heads up, some of the links below are affiliate links. If you end up purchasing any of the apps above, I get a small commission at no extra expense to you. And it really helps support the site!
Guitar Pro
Let’s kick things off with my favorite transcription app of choice. I’ve tried the heavy hitters, like Sibelius and Finale, but over time I’ve landed on Guitar Pro.
After watching countless Levi Clay videos, I reached out to Arobas Music and they were kind enough to hook me up with a copy of their app. That was during the days of Guitar Pro 6, and since then the app has grown dramatically in terms of features and polish.
I love the simplicity of the interface, and understanding the keyboard shortcuts make using the app a breeze. There’s a reason why when you buy tab packages they often come in both PDF and Guitar Pro formats.
If you’re using Guitar Pro to play back tab files, it’s great to be able to see and hear the notes go by. Rather than static tab on paper/PDF, using Guitar Pro gives you a chance to hear how the parts really sound. Not to mention, using a tool like this really helps fine tune your ear and make you a better musician overall. You can check my full review of the app out here.
EarMaster
Speaking of fine tuning your ear, one of my favorite ear training apps is EarMaster. The app uses over 2000 exercises to help train your ear, and also improve sight singing. You can use a MIDI keyboard to enter your answers, or you can use a mic to sing your answers right into the app.
There’s a really great beginner’s course, workshops, jazz training and much more. A limited amount of people are born with perfect pitch, but using an app like EarMaster can help your relative pitch improve by leaps and bounds.
I’ve always found the more I practice my ear training, the easier it is to pick up chord changes, intervals and more when I’m trying to learn a song or write a riff.
Transcribe!
Transcribe! is a program that does a few things really well. You can use it to slow down a song without changing the pitch. You can loop sections, and really hone in on what’s being played.
My favorite use case for the app so far, has been taking a video of a difficult riff I’m working on, slowing it down dramatically and then incrementally speeding it up until I can play it at full speed. I’ve done this with players like Thomas McRocklin, Greg Koch, Joe Bonamassa, Mr. Fastfinger, and many others.
It’s incredible to be able to see these guitarists play the riff, so you have a sense of where on the neck you should be, and then loop small sections. I truly feel that anyone can learn any riff, if they take it slowly and break it down, a few notes at a time. Transcribe! has helped me accomplish that, time and time again.
You can check out my full review of Transcribe! here.
Neck Diagrams
If you’ve seen scale or chord charts online, there’s a good possibility those diagrams came from the Neck Diagrams app. In our current era of doing guitar lessons online, Neck Diagrams has really helped me as a teacher, when it comes to sharing helpful information with students.
Whether you’re sharing all the modes, the pentatonic boxes, or chord shapes in an alternate tuning, Neck Diagrams has you covered. The options for showing interval relationships, target notes, and overall formatting is really simple and straightforward.
IINA Media Player
This is a new one for me, but it’s been helping me a lot. I found out about IINA from the good folks over at MacStories. It’s a Mac media player, and the way that I’ve been using it is to load up a ton of different audio exercises to make a quick playlist.
I’ve had a lot of fun using the guitar books from Fundamental Changes. Each of their books comes with full audio for all the exercises. What I’ll typically do is place a chapter’s worth of exercises into the player, so I can quickly move back and forth between the examples without having to constantly mess around with opening single files in Finder, or Quicktime (which I find clunky for this type of thing), or even Apple Music.
The app is free, is really well put together, and the developer seems like they’re always adding new features, and listening to feedback from users.
Audio Hijack and Loopback
I’m a huge fan of Rogue Amoeba’s apps, and have been using many of them for years. The two I use the most for guitar lessons and general audio routing/recording are Audio Hijack and Loopback.
Audio Hijack is an app that allows you to take audio from anywhere on your Mac, and make signal chains to record, monitor, and even stream what you’re hearing. I’ve used it quite a bit in the past to record Skype conversations for podcasts, or to capture audio from a source that typically doesn’t show up in my DAW (like Safari or really any other application that’s passing audio).
Loopback is like a big mixer for audio devices, programs and more. What I like to do for lessons, is take my Fractal AX8 and plug it in to a Focusrite audio interface. I have that set up as one device, but at the same time I also have a Rode USB mic for speaking to students. Loopback allows the student to hear both my vocals and guitar signal on either Skype or Zoom. The ability to combine audio sources was never easy on Mac, but Loopback has made it simple, in a very visual way.
The other cool thing is that if you’d like to record a session, you can simply pass the audio from Loopback right into Audio Hijack. The apps work very well together. If you’re looking for a dead simple version of their recording software, I can also vouch for their app Piezo. Check out all of Rogue Amoeba's apps here.
Logic Pro
This spot was taken by Pro Tools for many years, but more recently I have been all in on using Logic Pro. I’m a big fan of the way the mixer is laid out, I enjoy all of the stock plugins that Logic has to offer, and it really just gets the job done when I’m working out of my home studio.
It’s so important to be able to record yourself. Not only can you develop a lick library of your own, but recording yourself allows you to hear how you’re progressing on the instrument. It’s a lot of fun to have fragments of ideas in Logic that you can mash up, add to, and move around, ultimately making full songs.
While Logic costs around $299, if you have really any Apple device at this point, you’d be surprised at how much you can get done with GarageBand. Sometimes its limitations are just what you need to get more music recorded, rather than fiddling around with the endless options of Logic.
Apple Music & Spotify
I’m one of those weirdos who has two music streaming services. I enjoy Apple Music because it’s native, and that helps because I’m all in on the Apple ecosystem. I’m a big fan of being able to call out a song on my HomePod mini, pick up where I left off on my Mac, and then pop in my AirPods for taking my music on the go with my iPhone.
If it sounds like an ad for Apple, I can tell you that before Apple Music I was, and still am a subscriber to Spotify. I’ve always thought that Spotify’s recommendation algorithms have been superior, and I like what they’re doing in the podcast space as well (despite Spotify not being my default podcast app of choice - that’s Castro).
If you told 16 year old Brian that I wouldn’t need to have my collection of CDs, and that I’d be able to pull up nearly any song, at any time, I would’ve been ecstatic. Right now, I use either service to play back songs that I’m learning, add new and old music to my library, and create playlists for different projects I’m working on, or genres I’m trying to learn.
If you’re looking for a great app to keep up with new releases, check out MusicHarbor, which is available everywhere.
What are your go to apps for music?
The apps above are ones I install on day one, especially when it comes to being able to do just about anything with music. What are the apps that you use day in and day out on your device? Let me know by reaching out on Twitter or by emailing me at Brian@chasingsound.com.