tablature
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This iOS app makes creating and editing guitar tabs a breeze
One of the more tedious tasks of playing in a cover band is managing lyric and chord sheets. When you play a typical four-hour gig in a local bar, memorizing all that music is not always going to happen. You've got to study each song and learn your particular parts, sure, but having a cheat sheet with the verses and the chords on an iPad can really help keep you on track while you also manage your guitar, pedal effects and vocal performance. Gathering all this song data from the internet (or writing it out yourself) can take time. For me, the process usually involves finding the right transcription of the chords in the correct key online, copying the relevant bits from the web page and then creating a PDF on my computer for upload to Dropbox and my iPad so everyone can access it. An upcoming app called TabBank, currently in beta and set to release on July 27th, aims to simplify this process quite a bit, with a simple way to create and import chord sheets and tab right on an iPad or iPhone.
Reflow: A music composition and notation app for Mac and iOS with iCloud sync
Reflow for Mac (US$19) and iOS ($5.99) is a tool that makes composition and practice of music easier. A few weeks ago you may have seen TUAW's Editor-in-chief Victor Agreda, Jr. interview Sébastien Bourgeois, creator of Reflow, in our Origin Stories series. The interview spiked my curiosity about the app, so I took a closer look. While there are some great music notation apps out there for Mac (Tabular) and iOS (Weezic), what caught my attention about Reflow is that it supports both Mac and iOS. Plus, Reflow takes advantage of the latest Mac OS X and iCloud sync features. Let's say you're composing a song in Reflow on the Mac. Reflow (which supports fullscreen mode) will automatically save your work as you progress with autosave. And if things take an unsurprising turn, simply engage versions (just like you would in Pages, for example) and go back to the last iteration of your work that suits you best to carry on from. Finally, Reflow takes advantage of iCloud support, meaning you can be working on the Mac one minute and switch over to your iPhone or iPad and carry on where you left off the next. These simple features make a huge difference to the creative process by letting you focus on the music. But all of these great features would be meaningless if Reflow didn't have the basics to make a fantastic music notation app. Fortunately, it does. The app's beautifully simple interface lets you build multi-track (guitars, bass, keyboards, drums) compositions with musical notation or tablature. It's as easy as clicking or typing in a note or beat, playing on a MIDI keyboard or, for guitarists, dragging and dropping chords in from the extensive chord diagram database. Of course, you can create your own chords, too. Furthermore, Reflow gives you an audio representation of your work using a lightweight audio engine, so you have a great idea of what your composition will sound like before the real players step in. And you can modify and edit your work during playback. Reflow also lets you build and re-arrange your own song structures, so if you suddenly decide the intro sounds better as a middle-eight, just drag it over. Finally, Reflow also supports Guitar Pro and Power Tab files for import. Export your compositions in Guitar Pro, PDF, Wave and MIDI files, or share by email. For songwriters and composers looking to write for a typical band, Reflow has all the tools you'll need. But where Reflow stands above the rest is in its creative process and workflow. With iCloud support, Reflow allows you to transition work seamlessly between Mac or iOS and takes the worry out of saving your work as well as going back through previous versions.
TUAW Giveaway: Win a copy of Tabular for Mac
Thanks to the guys at Chromatic Labs, we've got three copies of Tabular for Mac to give away, worth US$19.99 each. Tubular is a comprehensive application for reading, editing and writing tablature music on a Mac. If you're a musician, music teacher or composer of music who's looking to use tablature, Tabular has all the tools you'll need. To find out more about Tabular, check out the review I did of it a little while ago here. Here are the rules and how to enter: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding Quebec) who are 18 and older. To enter, fill out the form below completely and click or tap the Submit button. The entry must be made before 3, May 2013 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time. You may enter only once. Three winners will be selected and will each receive a code to download Tabular for Mac with a value of $19.99. Click Here for complete Official Rules. Loading...
