PocketGuitar - Virtual Guitar in Your Pocket 4+

I like picking don’t get me wrong but It would be cooler to be able to play chords

I have had this app for many years - iPhone 4, iPhone 5s, and now, on my iPhone 7 Plus - it still works! What I like most is being able to change the tunings to experiment - especially open tunings and even “custom tuning”. With built- in effects, it can real wail (reverb, distortion)! You can hold and bend notes, etc. Great sustain. Fun to jam on - especially when you don’t have a guitar handy. You want chords? Play chords. This is for guitarists - not a “toy”. You have all 6 strings and 7 frets - strum or hammer-on or both. Seems to work well with the larger sized screen of my 7 plus. I hold it just like a guitar. Crazy!

This is a visually pretty guitar app with decent sounds and even some playability. I’m amazed it’s still on the App Store and not broken by iOS updates.

However: It’s never going to be like a real guitar. You have to play with it from the perspective of knowing and accepting this. The menus are clumsy (tiny targets, and you have to hold & drag, like the behavior of classic Mac OS 7 and earlier menus).

Also, as of today (January 6th, 2020), I’m noticing note fluctuation bugs. I have to restart the app to get it to stop doing this. It seems to be some mode that particular samples get stuck in where it flips back and forth between the normal sustained note sample and something else (maybe a different sample or playback rate). I assume this is due to iOS changes because it never did this to me before (though I don’t use the app much at all, I think I would’ve noticed it years ago if it happens this quickly in a session of use).

It’s kind of an iOS classic, and it still works, but it could stand to be updated.