The popular Tunefox app for learning and improving your banjo, mandolin, or guitar playing has some major news. Not only has the innovative iOS app received major updates with added features and many new songs and arrangements in the library, it is also now available for the first time for use with Android devices. The app can be downloaded from either the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Tunefox is the brainchild of a pair of Czech developers who refer to themselves only by their first names, Jiri and Jakub, both also passionate musicians. They have taken the app through a number of versions, with hundreds of tab arrangements of bluegrass favorites and jam standards available.
The app itself is a free download, and Tunefox charges a subscription fee to access the vast libraries and lessons. You can choose to pay $14.99 monthly if you only need occasional access, or annual subscriptions are only $7.50/month. They even offer a lifetime subscription for $299 for power users. Once you are subscribed, you can switch instruments at will.
One of the features that has made Tunefox so helpful for improving student pickers is the ability to choose the level of difficulty of the songs/tunes you are learning. By offering arrangements listed by difficulty, a user can master the versions in order as they feel ready. In this latest update, that function has been made even more useful with the inclusion of a difficulty slider. As you slide from difficult to easy, you will see notes drop out of the tab until you have just the very basic melody left. They have also included a vary slider, where the arrangement will add variations based on the difficulty you have chosen.
With this addition, their Hide Notes feature becomes even more valuable in helping you memorize arrangements. This feature will, as the name suggests, hide the note heads, forcing you to pull them from your memory. With this feature enabled, the tab will show which string the note is on, but not the fret number.
We spoke last week with Jordan Rhiem, chief content creator for Tunefox, who writes the arrangements these days for all new additions. He says that there is a great deal of n ew material on the banjo side, and he is working now to beef up content for guitar and mandolin. Subscribers have the ability to suggest songs that they would like to learn, and Jordan uses these suggestions to determine which tunes to put into the software.
He also created this detailed video that goes through all of the new features in the app. It is a bit lengthy (17 minutes), but very effectively describes how Tunefox works.
Tunefox is available for all iOS and Android devices, and can be downloaded at no charge from the normal sources.