iFretless Guitar 4+

This is such a useful and brilliant sounding music tool. Much like the oustanding ifretless bass and sax it would be perfect with IAA support.

if this is already in the works then please disregard, otherwise great work. I love the ifretless series and would purchase many more new instruments if made available. ifretless violin or trumpet maybe? :)

A killer apps for beginner and pro musicians alike!

(This review was original written for iFretless Guitar but the Bass and Sax versions are very similar with some instrument specific enhancement so I will just use this in all three reviews.)

The iFrelless Guitar is truly an amazing app, one of my top 10 most used music apps on my iOS devices, and I have hundreds of them!!

I think the app would be great for:

Budding musicians who wants to start sounding good from the start go and meanwhile learning and exploring the Guitar fretboard layout and how it relates to the piano keyboard. It is also great for learning and practising the different scale, modal and chord shapes for the guitar. (Been trying to convince the developer into adding a scale overlay to aid learning...would be even more awesome as a learning tool then. :))

Guitarists(and Bassists) who wants to have a realistic and great sounding onboard guitar instrument on their iOS, as well as a familiar fretboard interface to play and control other music apps like BS16-i, Sampletank, and hundreds of other synthesiser apps with.

Keybaord players who wants to add good guitar sounds to their arsenal, while being able to finely control all their sounds with the best pitch bending and velocity sensing(plus a CC touch controller pad) on the iOS.

The onboard guitar instruments sound great(you can have three guitars playing together), and while the onboard effects are quite good, you can even use Audiobus to output the sounds to effect apps like JamUp, Amplitube...etc to create your very own custom sounds. The developer has painstakingly layered and programmed the sound samples so that the instruments sound really responsive and realistic. Hands down the best sounding guitar soloing app on the iOS. (though it lets you play power chords concurrently as well!)

Where it really shines for me though is it's playing surface. No distraction with buttons and the likes. Pitch bending is absolutely awesome and definitely (the best)one of it's kind. Period. The control feels natural and intuitive and once you have learnt the basic scale pattern you can play in all keys easily(unlike the piano keyboard) and there are different tuning options to pick from. An optional touchpad can be activated to control any CC's you want(e.g.: timbre, filters, volume...etc). Velocity sensitivity is the best I have seen on any iOS app and while this still has some room to improve, this is more a limitation on the iOS and the developer is ready to pounce on any new technological possibilities to improve the app as soon as they become available.

With coreMIDI, you can use iFretless to control and play the hundreds of other music apps. One fun thing I have recently done is to use iFretless to control a good GM Soundfont hosted in BS16-i and viola, not only instantly I have 128 new instruments to play from, I also have a 81 key drum pad that is velocity sensitive, bendable and CC controllable! It works really well with Sampletank too having hundreds of acoustic, orchestral and synthesized sounds.

Great as it is as an instrument, I find the iFretless series has helped me greatly with my learning BOTH the guitar and the keyboard as well. With the colours of the strings denoting the black and white piano keys it allows me to explore the different scales and modes and translate what I know from the Guitar to the Keyboard and vice versa. You can also turn on the Key Labels so you know what you are playing if you get lost(which can happen as you are playing a 9 x 9 fretboard! A scale and mode overlay would be very helpful in this aspect and I have been emailing the developer Hans Anderson who is very helpful and responsive and he said that he was trying to get musicians to get away from the "scale" mindset and explore the other new sound territories and hence he had decided to leave that out for now but would keep his mind open about adding it later. While this is very true as I have found myself playing in surprising new ways, I think it is still good to have the option and allows a smooth and easier entry for new users. After all, it would be best to first learn the rules, THEN learn how to break them. :)

Other potential areas to improve would be easier assess to the option screen and it's interface, a "Polyphonic" mode to allow multiple notes to be played on the same string, more customizable note range(0-127), allowing other chord types to be played easily, having different MIDI channels for the chord output from the main, and a scale overlay with large number so scale and mode types for easier learning. These are by no mean the apps' shortcoming but rather just represent my wish list. :))

When I first got the app, I was hoping that iFretless would behave like my real guitar, but now I am almost wishing that my guitar would start to behave more like iFretless!

My hat off to Hans Anderson and his team for creating such an expressive and playable instrument. Clearly he cares a lot for his apps and would be committed to continue improving it. :)

Get the app, explore it a bit, learn the basic scale patterns(start from C-easy with the string colour), and you will be absolutely amazed at how realistic and expressive a Pro level music app can sound!