Boyd Timothy is a bluegrass musician from Utah. He’s a hard-core fan of the music, and like most of us, is a dedicated jammer. He is also a successful computer programmer with a degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and eleven year’s experience working at Novell, Inc.
Boyd has spent the past two years merging these two passions by creating and finalizing an app for pickers like himself, which has just been released for Apple iOS devices.
Bluegrass Guru is designed to serve as a digital fakebook of bluegrass songs. It not only can list the words to dozens of familiar favorites, it also incorporates a powerful search feature to allow you to quickly find and add lyrics to other songs, pull up videos from YouTube, or listen to the songs in iTunes or Spotify. Once the songs are included in your song list, you can add tags to categorize them and create lists which can be shared with band members or printed as a set list.
The app is available for iPhone and iPad, and is offered as a free download in Apple’s App Store. Some of the best features, however, require a Bluegrass Guru membership subscription, which is offered for $1.99/month or $9.99/year. These include the ability to back up all your songs, tags, and lists to iCloud. Ten free song searches are included with a free download, but these are unlimited with a membership.
By synching automatically to sites like bluegrasslyrics.com and bluegrassnet.com, the Guru can put the words to most popular bluegrass songs at your fingertips in seconds. Another quick tap and you are listening to the song in your phone – or watching it on video.
With microphone stand adaptors widely available for iPhones and iPads, this could be an indispensable tool for rabid jammers. If you’re the sort who can never think of a song at the session, or struggles to remember the words, you might be wise to get the free download and give this app a spin. The cost of an annual subscription is a small price to pay for having the words to your favorite songs in your pocket at all times.
Find out more about Bluegrass Guru online.