Why I Use This Guitar App for Chords and Instrumental Tracks

As a novice guitar and piano player, I love to learn chords by playing popular music. The Ultimate Guitar app is easy to use, provides access to chords across multiple instruments, and even has background tracks included with a subscription.

What is Ultimate Guitar?

Ultimate Guitar: Chords and Tabs, available on iOS and Android, is one of the best ways I’ve found to access chords and tabs for popular music. You can add songs with your own chord progressions, and the app itself even has “official” tabs that are accurate to a given song. This allows musicians to play songs on guitar or piano without struggling to figure out the chord progression on their own.

At any given moment, there are more than one million tabs on Ultimate Guitar. That means I have basically the entire history of music with chord notations only a tap away.

The Best Features on Ultimate Guitar

When I first used Ultimate Guitar, there were only guitar, piano, and (some) ukulele tabs. Now, the app has expanded to offer bass tabs and instrumental tracks if you’d like to try singing karaoke or playing along. However, these expanded features require a monthly subscription. There are also options to automatically scroll through the tab while you’re playing, which helps avoid any breaks in the music. You can even customize the scroll speed depending on the tempo of the song.

You can favorite tabs you’re likely to come back to or search for popular songs that are trending on the app. If you want, you can upload videos of yourself playing and/or singing a song and even access guitar lessons all on one app. If you’re not sure what you’d like to play, there are tabs sorted by genre that you can scroll through to see if inspiration strikes.

Better yet, you can customize your app to only show certain instrument tabs. I mostly play the piano, so I can see the key layout for a certain chord when I’m playing a song. This is helpful as I tend to have spurts where I don’t play for a while and forget some of the more complicated chord structures.

Finally, there are subscriptions for $9.99 per month or $39.99 per year, which grant access to guitar lessons and more advanced features. You can also see a free preview for courses like Spanish guitar strumming techniques and music theory to learn how to read music.

Why Ultimate Guitar Is Worth The Subscription

I love using the Ultimate Guitar app when inspiration strikes. Sometimes, I’ll hear a song on the radio or a new song comes up on my Apple Music shuffle, and I immediately know it’s a song I want to learn on piano or guitar. When this occurs, I can quickly pull up the song on the app, favorite the tab I want to return to later, and I’m all set for a jam session later.

Because you can upload your own chord progressions for songs, some songs have multiple versions, too. This is especially great if one version of a song doesn’t sound 100 percent correct.

I’ve played around with multiple versions of the same song to see which tab sounds better. There is even the option to transpose the chord structure to a different key if you’d like to try playing the song in a lower or higher key, too. This option is fantastic if you like to sing along to songs but don’t have the vocal range for some high or low notes.

You can also write your own tabs if you’re up for the challenge. I’m not at this level yet in my music journey, but I certainly hope to be one day!

The Ultimate Guitar app is a must-have whether you’re a music novice or maestro. This app covers everything from guitar to piano to even having background tracks if your only instrument is your voice! I bought into it a long time ago, when it only required a one-time purchase. However, even as a yearly subscription, it’s well worth the price to upgrade your musical endeavors.