The iPad Loops music app blog is proud to share news about Live Guitar by Secret Base Design.

Live Guitar for iPhone and iPad is designed to support playing complex chords, arpeggios, and finger-style guitar lines on your iOS device. Because the iPhone and iPad are not shaped like the neck of a guitar, the app provides an innovative way of selecting chords, while also leaving enough room to play individual strings accurately and expressively.

Chords are organized in sets, which you can customize and change on a song-by-song basis. A single touch on the fretboard selects the first chord of a set; two touches selects the second, and so on. It’s possible to move quickly and accurately between fifteen different chords without needing to look at the screen. When playing guitar, switching between chords smoothly is critical; the app has been designed so that you can play music, not just notes. By making switching between chords quick and easy, you can play complete songs, rather than just noodling around, locked into a single scale.

Single string notes and strums can be played with touches or swipes; the organic sonic texture that comes from varying note intensity is obtained by adjusting where on a string you touch. The interface orientation on the iPhone gives more space between the strings, allowing you to play individual strings more accurately.

Sets of chords can be assembled quickly within the app — choose from standard chord constructions, with dozens of chord types, or select specific chord voicing from the standard-tuning guitar interface. Sets of chords can also be imported and shared easily using the built-in Twitter interface.

MIDI connects your playing to laptop or desktop recording tools like GarageBand, Logic, Reaper, or ProTools. CoreMIDI, Virtual MIDI, and DSMIDI are all supported; you can choose the interface that gives you the best performance on your system. Live Guitar can send MIDI to the GarageBand app, as well as most other synthesizer apps.

Each string can be mapped to a different MIDI channel, to work with guitar tablature and transcription programs. Use Jam Maestro, Progression, or GuitarPro, and others — by using chords based on a standard tuning guitar, and a MIDI channel per string, you can capture every detail of your playing with ease.

Live Guitar has hundreds of sounds built in — guitars, basses, pianos, organs, and more. The app uses the acclaimed General MIDI SoundFont by Christian Collins, which can be found in many of the leading music apps. With support for Audiobus and Inter-App Audio, you can integrate Live Guitar with your other music apps, to add a natural and realistic guitar sound to your music.

Live Guitar