Acoustic guitar is a very popular instrument and it’s not any mystery why. There are numerous benefits in learning the acoustic guitar, such as building self-confidence and discipline while learning music theory, rhythm and mastering simple chords. They have an incredible sense of achievement once they have achieved their goals because they’ve practiced regularly, worked hard and stuck to it. Here are some apps that will help you learn this great skill.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Learning Acoustic Guitar
Not all guitar learning apps are created equal. Some offer great features for beginners, such as real-time feedback on your playing, play-along tabs and even instructional videos. Others are better suited to more experienced guitarists, allowing you to record and listen back to your playing in order to learn, from hearing, exactly where you need to improve.
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If the app offers play-along tabs or chords, its song library is probably the most important factor to consider. Even if you’re just starting out, you’ll likely have an idea of the kind of music you’ll want to learn on guitar. Being able to play along to your favourite songs will keep you motivated – but playing outside of your comfort zone can also be a useful learning tool.
Keep in mind the level you’re at with the guitar – and the level you want to reach – while looking at learning apps.
The best guitar learning apps at a glance:
The Gibson App
Fender Play
Yousician
GarageBand for iOS
AmpliTube
Songsterr Guitar Tabs & Chords
BandLab
Ultimate Guitar: Chords & Tabs
Chordify
Justin Guitar Beginner Lessons: Play Real Songs
The Gibson App
The Gibson App
Image: Gibson
- Real-time feedback thanks to Audio Augmented Reality
- Free to try
– Sheer volume of features can be overwhelming for beginners
Gibson’s new smartphone app is aimed at guitarists of all levels. Alongside things such as a tuner, play-along tabs and direct access to Gibson’s online store, the app is built around what the brand calls Audio Augmented Reality.
Essentially, this is a system that responds to you as you play along to lessons and exercises, making the experience feel like an interactive lesson. And, handily, no equipment other than a smartphone, an acoustic or electric guitar and a pair of headphones is required.
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Tabs for songs by artists such as Eric Clapton, BB King, Tom Petty, Dolly Parton, Santana, Aerosmith, The Beatles, Foo Fighters, Thin Lizzy are accessible through the app, with each song being able to be adjusted to your skill level. And it’s not just the legends who are on there – tabs for younger, more contemporary artists such as Billie Eilish are available on the Gibson App, too.
What we especially like about the app is how players get a free one-on-one video consultation with a professional Gibson guitar tech. The video call will cover a variety of basic guitar tune-up and maintenance tasks – great for beginners who want to take care of their new instrument.
Price: £13.49/$14.99 a month or £79.99/$89.99 a year
Platform: Android and iOS
Fender Play
fender play
- In-depth ‘learning paths’ to keep you engaged
- Long-running and constantly being improved
– A little pricier than other options
Since Fender introduced its tuition platform back in 2017, the brand has added consistent upgrades to make Fender Play arguably the best digital learning tool today.
The app contains hundreds of easy-to-follow lessons and guides to improve your playing and ability. Once you sign up, you’ll answer a variety of questions on preferred instrument and genre. Your responses will then guide the creation of a comprehensive, customised curriculum comprising what Fender describes as personal “learning paths”.
The platform was created with the guidance of educational advisers from Thornton School of Music at University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Musicians Institute in Hollywood. There’s plenty going on under the hood here to ensure you stay engaged, such as a progressive new micro-learning strategy, for those of you that have had your concentration levels zapped by endless scrolling on social media. It’s £15.99 a month, but given the research and quality of tuition, it’s more than worth the price. Did you really expect a bad product from Fender?
Price: £15.99/$9.99 per month
Platform: Android or iOS
Yousician
- Instant feedback
- Large song library spanning a lot of genres
– Video-game-like approach not be for everyone
Have you always wanted to play the guitar, but the beginning always seemed slow and frustrating? Well, Yousician is here to help you along the way with a curriculum written by music teachers to help both beginners and intermediate players alike.
Suitable for guitar, bass and even ukulele, the app offers step-by-step video tutorials with a library of over 1,500 “missions” and exercises, plus the ability to provide instant feedback on your performance. The app is free to download but it does require a premium subscription for unlimited and uninterrupted playtime across all platforms.
Price: Free (subscription service offered starting at £14.99/$19.99 per month)
Platform: Desktop, Android and iOS
GarageBand for iOS
GarageBand for iOS
Image: Apple
- Teaches you basic recording techniques
- Lets you experiment with a wide variety of virtual guitar gear
– Not for beginners looking for more structured learning
Almost every millennial’s beginner DAW, GarageBand is now available in your pocket, too. It’s perfect for when inspiration strikes and you simply have to record that bossa nova-trap beat that you’ve been humming to yourself at your local café. GarageBand allows you to turn your iPhone or iPad into a respectably deep DAW, particularly due to its price and array of quality on-board amplifier and pedal sims.
You can use a Touch Instrument, microphone and a guitar, and instantly record them with support for up to 32 tracks. Free virtual instruments are also available via GarageBand’s sound library. Add to that a virtual drummer that’ll play along to your track to keep you in time, and you’re set.
Recording, mixing and exporting a song can be done at 24-bit audio resolution and you can also upload your track directly to YouTube and SoundCloud. Billie Eilish wrote Bad Guy in a bedroom – go one better and write your masterpiece with your phone in one hand and overpriced flat white in the other.
Price: Free
Platform: iOS only
AmpliTube
learning apps
- Easy to use
- Much more affordable than buying the actual, physical gear
– Not for beginners looking for more structured learning
Made by IK Multimedia, AmpliTube is the free companion app to iRig. It essentially allows you to use any device – be it your phone, tablet or wind-up radio – to process, play and record your guitar and bass while you’re on the move. It offers an extensive library of realistic virtual versions of some of the globe’s most sought-after gear. The app is super intuitive and easy to use, and it lets you drag and drop gear to create custom rigs.
It uses the same digital signal processor as the acclaimed AmpliTube Custom Shop for Mac and PC, so it’s easy to see why this has become somewhat of an industry standard. AmpliTube comes with a great collection of gear that includes 11 pedal effects (delay, fuzz, overdrive, wah, envelope filter, chorus, flanger, phaser, octave, noise filter and distortion), five amps (clean, crunch, lead, metal and bass), five speaker cabs and two microphones (dynamic 87 and condenser 87).
Price: £23.99/$19.99
Platform: Android and iOS
Songsterr Guitar Tabs & Chords
songsterr site screenshot
- Enormous song library
- Helpful playback features
– User-generated content
Songsterr has long been a go-to application for campfire guitarists due to its easy and user-friendly UI – and the fact that it has over 500,000 tabs and chords listed in its ever-expanding catalogue. And this isn’t one of those online libraries with dozens of tab versions for each song. Due to Songsterr’s high transcription quality, there’s just a single tab per song, and the music creators and writers get paid, too. Something to ensure your morals aren’t compromised while you’re learning your favourite Smiths track…
The app also offers a count-in as well as the ability to solo instruments and loop selected measures. Tabs will display and scroll across the screen while the song is played, which might take some getting used to for newbies. It’s reliable, updated regularly and only costs a couple of dollars a month.
Price: £3.56/$4.99 per month
Platform: Desktop, iOS and Android
BandLab
bandlab
- Full-featured, especially given that it’s free
- Collaborative learning experience
– Not for beginners looking for more structured learning
With over 30 million users and an in-built social networking platform, BandLab is the perfect DAW for collaboration. You can upload tracks to the cloud-based workstation to further your music with over 100 guitar and bass presets and the ability to record acoustic guitars, keyboards, pianos and synths with virtual MIDI instruments.
The app comes with unlimited cloud storage and a handy mastering tool, too, so you never need to use external apps or programs to complete your mixes. And the new BandLab Sounds offers a massive library of free loops to build your own backing track.
Not in the mood to write? Then discover and stream millions of tracks made by emerging and established artists to reignite your creative spark. It’s also totally free, with no paywalls or subscriptions.
Price: Free
Platforms: Desktop, Android and iOS
Ultimate Guitar: Chords & Tabs
- Huge library of tabs that’s constantly expanding
– Accuracy of tabs is hit or miss
You’d be hard-pressed to find a guitarist that hasn’t used Ultimate Guitar at some point during their playing life. It has the largest online catalogue with free access to over 1.6 million tabs and lyric sheets.
The app also offers dark mode, so you can check your screen during a gig without blinding yourself onstage, plus the option to switch to left-handed mode, compile playlists and adjust font sizes. There’s also the option of a Pro account which offers interactive tabs, transposition and an autoscroll function.
Price: Free (Pro upgrade option also available at various prices)
Platform: Desktop, Android and iOS
Chordify
chordify mobile app
- Learn the chords for any song that’s on YouTube
- Affordable
– Doesn’t work as well for learning riffs
While similar to both Songsterr and Ultimate Guitar, Chordify differs in its ability to offer a capo option and the capacity to download songs as MIDI files for easy editing.
The programme has over 8,000,000 songs on tap, and integrates seamlessly with YouTube: It automatically recognises the chords via the audio signal and will synchronise this with your song in a simple and innovative music player. Pretty neat.
Price: £4.99/$6.99 per month
Platform: Desktop, Android and iOS
Justin Guitar Beginner Lessons: Play Real Songs
- A more personal learning experience than some apps
- Great for beginners
– Not the biggest library
Justin Guitar is one of the most revered tuition accounts on YouTube, so it’s fitting that his exploits have been turned into a useful app for beginners. Justin Sandercoe offers everything you could possibly need as a beginner, offering structured courses in different grades – there’s everything from technique exercises to chord theory to strumming patterns. Over a million players have learned to play using Sandercoe’s website, JustinGuitar.com, and now those lessons are available in an interactive format.
Price: £8.49/$9.99 per month
Best app to learn guitar for free
- Real Guitar
Real Guitar is a guitar simulator. It can simulate both acoustic and electric guitars (perfect if you have an electro-acoustic guitar), and it works on both tablets and smartphones. It also supports multitouch, which is crucial for playing chords, but you’ll need a device with multitouch capabilities for that feature to work.
What’s even cooler is that it comes with track loops that you can play along to, plus a recording mode and the ability to export to MP3. This means you can actually come up with songs, play them with Real Guitar, and record them for later.
Download: Real Guitar for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- Perfect Ear
While Perfect Ear isn’t a guitar-specific app, it’s extremely useful for anyone who wants to learn to play guitar (or any other musical instrument for that matter). In short, it aims to develop two crucial skills that every musician must practice: rhythm and tone.
Perfect Ear comes with dozens of interval, scale, chord, and rhythm training exercises to help you get comfortable with and understand music. It also has trainers for sight-reading, absolute pitch, and note singing. If you have trouble distinguishing different tones, you need this app.
And if you want to dive into the deep end, Perfect Ear also contains articles on music theory, which will come in handy if you ever intend to write your own songs.
Download: Perfect Ear for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- GuitarTuna
There are loads of mobile apps that can help you tune your guitar, but GuitarTuna is the absolute best. It can also handle bass, ukulele, violin, cello, banjo, and a bunch of other popular string instruments, so you won’t need to find another app if you pick up another instrument later.
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You pluck the guitar string, the app listens with your device’s microphone, and it shows you which note the sound is registering as. This makes it very easy to adjust your tuning as a beginner, but even as an expert this can be helpful because the app supports hundreds of alternative tunings.
Download: GuitarTuna for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- smartChord
3 Images
smartchord menu
smartchord circle of fifths
smartchord metronome
If you want an all-in-one app for guitarists, smartChord is a great choice. It started off as an app for learning all of the different chords and fingerings on the guitar fretboard but has since evolved into something more comprehensive.
The reverse chord finder is really helpful, but smartChord also has features for tone determination, hundreds of predefined tunings, dozens of different scales, a basic metronome, a virtual guitar for when you can’t lug your actual guitar around, a precise tone generator, and more.
Download: smartChord for Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
- Metronomerous
Most metronome apps are too basic. They get the job done when you’re a beginner, but their limits are quickly reached as you improve your skills. As soon as you hit that point, you’ll want to start using Metronomerous, one of the best metronome apps around.
The interface may be a bit intimidating at first, but that’s only because it can do so much. It can go as far down as eighths, sixteenths, triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets. It can accent on any note down to the sixteenth or triplet note, it can mute during bars to make sure you’re on tempo, and it can even program complex beat sequences.
If you only need a basic beat, it may be overkill. But when basic isn’t good enough, Metronomerous is the only app that will give you the freedom you need.
Download: Metronomerous for Android (Free)
- Justin Guitar
Justin Guitar is one of the best websites for learning to play the guitar. There’s a reason that every beginner guitar player is pointed towards the site. The website hosts a huge number of lessons from Justin Sandercoe, who breaks down the basics of the instrument simply, and he will have you strumming a tune in no time.
This app is a great extension of that and provides everything you could need. It has a tuner, video tutorials, interactive lessons, and over 1000 songs that you can play along to so that you can hit those chords perfectly. The app will track your progress through all of the lessons and score you as you go, so you can pick up and play right where you left off.
Download: Justin Guitar for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- Yousician
Using apps as tuners (or even using Google Search to tune your guitar) or learn some chords is all well and good, but how do you know that you’re actually playing the right thing? That the sound coming out of your guitar is good and your fingers are positioned properly?
While there might never be a replacement for a real teacher, Yousician gets pretty close. This app has step-by-step video guides that teach you lessons designed by music teachers, covering topics such as chords, strumming, melodies, fingerpicking, and more.
The best thing is that it actually listens to your playing and then judges your performance, so you know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.
Download: Yousician for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- Guitar 3D
If you are trying to learn chords—and you probably are if you’re a beginner—then Guitar 3D is a great app to help you out. It contains every chord you’ll need to get going, but the twist here is that it demonstrates them in 3D. This means that you can quickly see where your fingers should be positioned on the guitar.
Not only that, but it demonstrates the finger transitions between chord changes, which is very important when trying to learn a song. The app also highlights the strings that you need to play and offers a split-screen mode so you can see both hands clearly.
Alongside this are lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge on chords. You’ll be a chord master in no time.
Download: Guitar 3D for Android | iOS (Free)
- Andy Guitar
Andy Guitar is another app fronted by a personable teacher. As you might guess, the instructor here is called Andy, and he guides you through loads of lessons and song tutorials, along with answering the most common questions that new guitarists ask.
Andy is a great and patient teacher. The lessons are laid out plainly and the progression is clear, so you’ll feel like you’re learning quickly. One of the great things about Andy Guitar is that it actually teaches you modern songs too. Often guitar apps tend to focus on rock classics, but Andy mixes between the likes of The Beatles and Maroon 5 with ease.
Download: Andy Guitar for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
- 3000 Chords
3 Images
3000 chords library
3000 chords c6
3000 chords learn chord progress
If you want a straightforward app that is packed full of every chord you’ll ever want to learn, 3000 Chords is the one for you. It isn’t as fancy as some of the other apps listed here, but it’s simple and achieves exactly what it aims to do: be a great, free database of chord diagrams.
3000 Chords not only shows you the chords, but it can also play them to you so you can match up the sound. It also has chord and ear training games so that you can learn some simple guitar theory too. Plus, and this is something often overlooked, it supports left-handed guitarists.
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