Guitar! by Smule app review: learn and practice a variety of popular songs

Introduction

This guitar app features more than 40 well-known songs for you to master, including a nice variety of artists such as Elton John, Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Leonard Cohen, Bruno Mars, and Rihanna.

There really is something for everyone here, so if you enjoy games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, this is definitely an app you’ll want to check out.

Showcase Your Six-String Skills

This isn’t the ideal app for people that want to learn to play a real instrument, but it definitely has some fun game mechanics in and of itself, and there is a great learning curve which you can pick up by mastering the various guitar techniques as they’ve been ported to an app format.

You start off playing on easy mode and as you improve your skills you can unlock higher difficulty levels and harder songs, as well as a selection of electric and acoustic guitars; you can pay for a subscription to unlock everything all at once but if you’d rather have the challenge of progressing by yourself, there is that option also.

There are a range of in-game guitar techniques for you to practice with this app, utilizing your device’s touch screen with gestures such as:

• Picking by tapping individual strings;
• Strumming by swiping your finger across the strings;
• Changing chord shapes by choosing from the colored onscreen tabs; and
• Creating vibrato by shaking your device

What’s more, you can produce different volumes depending on how hard you tap a string or how fast you swipe your finger across the screen.

You’ll love the dynamics offered in this regard because it makes for some far more emotive ‘playing’ and a lot more fun generally.

If you don’t want to spend the time unlocking all of the songs, you can subscribe as a premium user to gain full access to the Guitar! song library.

This is a good idea for those of you who are itching to unlock a particular song but don’t have the patience to wait for it; just sink a few bucks into a subscription and away you go!

Also, the developer has promised that more songs will be released weekly so keep your eyes open for new releases.

The following subscriptions are available via in-app purchase:

• Weekly   $2.99
• Monthly  $4.99
• Annual   $39.99

Each subscription provides unlimited access to every song in the Guitar! catalog and these subscriptions will automatically renew 24 hours prior to the end of their respective billing periods.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• More than 40 songs featuring vocals from the singers of the Sing! Karaoke app
• Progress at your own pace or subscribe to unlock all of the content immediately

Cons

• This is a game and not a guitar tutorial app

Final Words

As an actual guitarist, I find this app to be a lot of fun; it’s definitely not going to help you much in terms of improving your guitar-playing abilities but the game play style is in a similar vain to games like Guitar Hero.

I really like the way you can progress at your own pace through the game without having the in-app purchases shoved down your throat; the subscriptions are well worth purchasing but you don’t have to rush through the songs and difficulty levels if you don’t want to.

Personally, I think Guitar! is a massive amount of fun with tons of replay value, but I think I’ll be sticking with the real thing for the foreseeable future.