I started learning guitar back in August. The why and how is a long tale, which continues to get stranger and more magical nearly by the day. I won’t bore our readership with my personal journey. Rather, I’m going to focus on a review of the app I’m using to learn: Simply Guitar.
There are many apps in this space, including some by big names in the industry. For example, legendary guitar maker Fender has Fender Play, and there’s also Yousician and Justin Guitar. That latter one deserves some attention, as Justin makes his intro levels available for free.
Simply Guitar has a reputation for being good for beginners, but eventually the journey ends. At 61 hours of practice, I’m about 75% of the way through the course. I’ve seen several comments by people saying they started with SG and then moved on to Yousician.
In my case, my daughter already was using the app and so it was easy/cheap to add second player.
But Why An App?
People have learned guitar for centuries without propping up their phone to play along, so what is the benefit? The neat-o factor these apps provide is that they listen. If you pluck a C and it’s supposed to be an E, it shows up as red on the music.
The apps do this through your phone’s microphone, which is good enough to distinguish the frequency of different sounds. It works surprisingly well. The apps seem to struggle on chords but in my experience is nearly 100% on notes. I primarily practice on an acoustic. On electric, accuracy is similar but you need to turn off reverb, distortion, etc. on your amp and play clean…or play without an amp, which works as well.
The Daily Experience
The app works through a series of courses. You start with Guitar Basics, then Guitar Essentials, and then can bounce back and forth between solo and rhythm courses. It does have an end, and disappointingly I’ve heard that the end has been there for some time, so I’m not sure new courses are being added. However, new songs are often added: there have several batches of new songs added since I started.
If you’d like a get a feel for Simply Guitar, you can download the Simply Tune app (free), and look under “play songs” on that app. You’ll see the same technology, except there’s no instruction.
Typically you learn a chord, song, technique, etc. and then there’s a song to go with it. The songs at this stage are simplified-down versions…you’re not really playing “Eye of the Tiger” but rather certain beginner-friendly parts of it. Some songs are re-keyed to make them beginner-accessible.
Every guitar course I’ve looked at follows the same rough outline: bootstrap some chords, then teach songs using those chords so you can practice them. E Minor is often the first chord because it’s so simple, then A Minor, etc. SG starts with E Minor, Asus2, A Minor, and C Major. Other courses introduce A, D and E earlier. There really is no “right” order in which to learn. Many programs, including Simply Guitar, start introducing more difficult chords like F Major with simplified versions (FMaj7, for example) so you can complete songs.
I want to emphasize that I picked up a guitar for the first time 2 months ago. Less than 60 days later I’m (barely) playing barre chords. I say this because a lot of SG looks very basic to an experienced guitarist (or even a newcomer). Starting at “how do I tune this thing,” I needed that level of instruction.
However, SG has not been the only thing I’ve been doing. Probably about 80% of my time is SG, and the rest is learning riffs I looked up, or working on exercises I saw on YouTube.
Pros and Cons
One of SG’s big plusses is that it give beginners access to songs they otherwise couldn’t play. It’ll be a long time before I can play “Here Comes the Sun” by George Harrison, which includes such exotic chords as Daad9 and some complex finger-picking. However, in SG, I can strum along and play most of it, and it felt really cool to hit that (simplified) finger-picking. My nightly set list includes the Grateful Dead, Simon & Garfunkel, Bill Withers, the Police, AC/DC, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Albert King, Leonard Cohen, and Ram Jam. That’s my jam – if you like more recent music, there’s actually more recent music than older stuff. There’s even Taylor Swift. My point i that I find this a more engaging session than playing Happy Birthday and other beginner songs.
The grading technology works very well, but pedagogically it is a one-trick pony. To move on to the next segment of a lesson, you need to play what’s presented, but you only need to play through it somehow. Let’s say the microphone is listening for a series of notes, such as A-E-A. If you play those notes, you move on, but you could play A-E-A, A-E-C-D-oops-A, A-A-A-E-A, etc. Each note is a binary “did you hit it”. The app doesn’t test “A-E-A” but rather each note individually.
I play with my Airpods and sometimes it sounds like I’m amazing because the full band is playing…to someone sitting across the room, all they hear is my (often very) imperfect part. I recommend listening to yourself play because a huge part of guitar is making the sound you want to make.
Early on, I discovered some famous exercises that are very helpful. Most guitarists will do “spiders” and scales. In SG, they are not presented until you’re a ways in and not really emphasized. I understand the reason: most casual players are not going to sit and do spiders for 15 minutes a day because it’s boring. OTOH, some things such as the pentatonic scale are drilled a lot because they’re so common in songs.
“You Should Get a Guitar Teacher”
This is a fair point. It’s easy to drill things wrong, and practice can make permanent. Early on, I mixed up a couple fingerings in my chords and had to later spend a couple sessions relearning those chords. An in-person teacher would have spotted that immediately.
Some parts of playing guitar are frankly very difficult. Barre chords are famous for this, and for beginners, even a three-fret stretch like C Major will take some time to actually sound right. A teacher could look at your hands and help you find the right angles, what you’re doing wrong, if you just need to train you strength a little, etc. A self-taught guitarist will need to brute force through things like that. Fortunately, there’s the Internet and a galaxy of guitar content available to help.
I’ve also heard it said (about 6:00) that the basic concepts you can teach yourself, but at some point you need (or at least would greatly benefit from) instruction. And if you hit a roadblock or plateau and don’t seem to be improving, a good instructor would be hrelpful.
Conclusion
Since I don’t know anything else, I’ll give SG an A because it’s brought me this far. I enjoy playing with the app every day. I’m about 75% of the way through, which means the entire course is probably about 90ish hours of instruction. It’s clear I’ll soon outgrow it and move on, but it’s been a fun startup.
Have you tried other apps for learning music? Which is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!
I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.
I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308
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