Guitar Tuner+
The first ever personalized guitar tuner app is up on the AppStore! Whenever passion meets expertise, expect fireworks. This is one of the rare cases when our team’s favorite thing outside work met our client’s strategic decision to develop an app.
Mission
When Livintis W.L.L. contacted us with an idea of building a guitar tuner app for iPhone, we were excited but a bit skeptical knowing how many tuner apps are out there already. However, minutes into our call with Managing Director, Ritvik Menon, we realized they were not looking to make another confusing digital tuner application. They wanted to create an experience that would encourage aspiring musicians while catering to seasoned players.
We couldn’t have been happier to take on this mission as musicians ourselves and members of a design and development team.
Our approach had to be insightful and inclusive, speaking to a wide range of musicians with different tastes in music, instruments, and prowess.
In the beginning, it was crucial for us to understand what musicians expect from a tuner app. For an outsider, it might seem like a somewhat serious guitarist would not use a conventional app but a hardware tuner of some sort. In reality, professionals use apps they can find on the App Store (and you’d be surprised by some of their choices, Honeyhoney on JRE), or tune by ear from the note they get from GarageBand (whadup, Ola Englund).
Onboarding
The onboarding flow is clean and simple highlighting main features of the app, which makes it easy for beginners to jump right in.
Smart Tuner
One of the things we wanted to visualize in the guitar. It’s important for beginners to know exactly which string to pick when tuning, so we had to make the main screen UI easy to read but add visual value too.
We started off with a neck profile layout and personalized instrument display based on the selection made on the first launch. This was a strategic decision, as the more instruments get added, the better personalization gets added, especially with extended range and classical instruments.
Chromatic Tuner
In the beginning, we’ve mentioned that our original idea was to create an app that even professional musicians could find benefit in. In our experience with the guitar, we’ve transitioned from standard to a lot of different tunings which resulted in finding favorite ones and memorizing them. If you remember your tuning, you don’t need to look at the strings to tune, you just need an indication of whether you are above or below the pitch.
Chromatic tuners are the type of tuners for doing that. The how studio, rack, and pedalboard tuners work. So, one of our initial suggestions to the client was adding the chromatic tuner in a minimalist professional style you would expect from high-end sound equipment.
Settings
One of the challenging parts for beginner guitarists is understanding how different tunings are applied over a standard one. Our approach here was to give just enough alternative tuning options to cover most of your musical needs. We’ve added several lower and open tunings, and the renowned DADGAD aka Modal D in hopes that they make tuning in and out of these quick and easy.
