It’s been awhile since I wrote about one of my favorite apps, so that is exactly what I’m doing today. Tabs is an app for both iPhone and iPad by Ultimate-Guitar.com, which is my go-to source for chords to just about any song you could ever think of.
The app itself costs $2.99, but there is also a subscription fee you must pay before accessing songs. However, the fee is nominal — I paid $5.99 for 12 months of full access to over 300,000 songs.
This is one of the most frequently used apps on my iPad, because my students and music therapy clients are always requesting songs that I don’t know off the top of my head. The app allows me to search for any song or band/artist, transpose songs to any key, look up a chord if I’m not familiar with it, and even auto-scroll the song so that my hands don’t have to leave the guitar or piano.
My favorite features are playlists and favorites. I can save songs to separate playlists for each of my students as well as keep a running list of favorites for myself, which motivates me to sit down and practice when I have a bit of downtime. I have always loved the website, but now instead of printing out sheet after sheet, I can just grab the iPad and play.
Have you tried this app yet? If so, what are your thoughts — and how do you use it? And if not, I’d love to hear your preferred method for finding chords/tabs to songs and using them in sessions or lessons.
This did sound like a great app. If I hadn’t already gotten OnSong I definitely would have downloaded this one. In OnSong it is kind of the same thing where I can just look up a song and put it into my list. The only downside is that it doesn’t have every single song I ask for. But then again, what program could do that anyway? So when I can’t find a song on there, I usually go to google and find my chords that way and copy and paste them into OnSong. The great thing about it is that I can group all of my songs together into books of different genres, originals, etc. And the best thing about it is that I can sync it with Dropbox and back up all 320 songs that I have! I can back it up as an OnSong file or as a PDF to print out.
Ok, you are seriously making me want to go out RIGHT NOW and buy an iPad…. This sounds like an app that would be indispensable to me!
And thanks, Ashley, for mentioning backing things up in DropBox. I hadn’t thought of that, but I will be pestering my computer guru (aka my hubby) about it later!