Here are a few products I use often:
Guitar Software
GarageBand may be simple, easy to use, have tons of helpful features, and be easy to record with and manipulate your guitar’s sounds, but… wait, there is no but. You may want something more powerful for professional recording and mixing, but it isn’t necessary. I use GarageBand all the time for quickly recording song ideas and developing song ideas. It’s a great deal with iLife, and free with a new Mac.
Guitar Pro is an incredibly useful program for learning and recording. It has so many features that I’ll let you see for yourself on their website:
Capo is another program I often use for manipulating songs I want to play along with. Their tagline is “Reverse Engineering Rock and Roll”. I often open it up, drop a song file in, then slow it down or change the key so I play along with it, then export it to an iTunes list. You can see all of Capo’s feature on their site below.
Line 6 provides both hardware and software that can be extremely useful and fun for guitarists. As a college freshman looking for a cheap amp, I decided instead to get Line 6’s famous Pod, and haven’t regretting it for a moment (tons of digitally modeled amps and effects to play with, an excellent way to record to your computer, easy to hook up to a speaker system, small and portable, with complementary software, tone updates, and access to Line 6’s tone).
Guitar Apps
- Cleartune — The best, most intuitive tuner app I’ve seen
- AT-METRONOME — A powerful and easily-customizable metronome
- Musician’s Practice Journal — A great way to track your improvement and practices
- Chordmaster — Quickly find, see, and hear any chord on the guitar
- Scale Wizard — Made by the Chordmaster people, find, see, and hear tons of scale positions on the fretboard.
- Guitar Interval Ear Training — Great for ear training and visualizing intervals on the guitar
- JamTracks — Everybody loves good jam tracks
- Ultimate Guitar Tabs — Access their guitar tabs and chords from your smart device
- GarageBand — Record, compose, mix, export, and more.