To help promote his new Broadway musical, Bright Star, written with Edie Brickell, Steve Martin has created and is giving away a free iOS app with banjo tabs for all the songs in the show.
The Bright Star app will work on iPhones and iPads and can be downloaded for free from iTunes.
As has become his habit, Steve composed all the music for the show with his banjo, and then sent the tunes along to Edie who added the lyrics. So not only is this a rare Broadway hit with the banjo primary to the score, it is surely the first written on the old five string.
And as a picker at heart, Martin didn’t forget all his banjo pals eager to learn how to play along with the soundtrack.
All 14 songs from the show are included in the app, transcribed for either 3 finger or clawhammer style banjo, as the case may be. It was developed by Jiri Markalous, a Czech banjo player and app coder, and Bennett Sullivan, who has played banjo on stage for Bright Star, and worked with Jiri on a number of other apps for banjo players.
Here are a couple of screenshots, for iPhone and iPad respectively.
You can find full details about the app online, or in iTunes.
