STG 120: 5 Must-Have Mobile Apps For Teaching Guitar

Mobile devices are one of the coolest innovations of the 21st century. Never before in the history of the world have we had so much power and access to so much information in our back pockets. Now you can run your entire teaching studio, communicate with your students, do your marketing and even teach your lessons from a device that fits in the palm of your hand, and there are new applications that can make your life easier and more productive are being developed all the time.

In this episode, I’ll tell you about 5 of my favorite mobile apps for teaching guitar…some of them are even completely free to use. I’ll give you the details of each one, along with links you can use to check them out, and I’ll also tell you how they can be used in your teaching studio to help you be more effective with your lessons. The mobile age is here and it’s easier and less expensive than ever to leverage technology so you can be more successful with your teaching business.

To call in with a question, a comment or to leave feedback for the show, call the Listener Feedback Hotline at (719) 428-5480 and leave a message! I just might include your recorded message in a future episode.

Items Mentioned In This Episode

Link – Music Teacher’s Helper (Use promo code 3B007F to save 20% off your first month)
Link – Evernote
Link – GuitarToolkit+
Link – Garageband
Link – Dropbox
Link – Ultimate Guitar Tabs

Podcast Transcript

We live in a mobile world, my friends. Mobile applications have taken the world by storm over the last ten years. That smartphone sitting in your pocket right now is way more powerful than the desktop computers we were using even just a decade ago. The number of people using mobile devices is growing rapidly every single year, and actually, these little pocket handheld computers are going to eventually replace laptops and desktops completely for most people in the very near future.

There are a lot of things you can use them for. You can use a smartphone, like an iPhone or an Android, to connect to the Internet, to communicate with people all over the world via email, via Skype, via all these other methods. You can store important data on your smartphone. You can run the programs that you use and love, and take them with you wherever you go. You can consume media, like music and movies and television programs any time you want, any way you want, from wherever you are, all on your mobile device.

You can improve your skills through taking online training courses and things like that, all from your mobile device. You can organize your life with your calendar and your to-do lists and everything that you have going on, all from your mobile device. You can even do crazy things with a handheld mobile device. Crazy things like start your car. There is an app that will actually let you start your car from your mobile device. You could control your TV. You can turn your mobile device into a remote control. You can use it to monitor your heart rate. You can use it to tell what your altitude is at any given time.

You can use it to avoid speed traps. There is actually a database, a mobile app that has a database of speed traps all over the country, here in the United States at least, that places that are known to be frequented by cops looking to write tickets, so you can avoid them. You can buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks right from your mobile device and pay for it from your mobile device. You can even prove to your significant other that they snore. There is a mobile device that will come on at night and record someone snoring so that you can go back and play it for them and prove to them that they snore. That reminds me of The Three Stooges episode I saw a long time ago, where Moe slaps Larry across the head and he says, “Hey, stop snoring,” and Larry goes, “Hey, I stayed up all night to see if I snored one time and I didn’t.”

Anyway, I’m not really a comedian. That was just something I thought of when I was telling you about the snore-recording app. But the point is there are lots of different things you could do on your mobile device, and they keep innovating and coming up with new, useful applications every single day. And the really cool thing about all this stuff is that most of these apps are actually free, and the ones that you pay for, it’s not like you have to pay a hundred dollars like you do for a Windows app, like QuickBooks I think is almost two hundred dollars for a desktop accounting app. They cost like two dollars or five dollars or ten dollars. You know?

So, this stuff is really powerful and it’s totally portable because it’s on your device and it’s affordable, and there are lots of cool things that can make your life and your business a lot easier if you use them. That’s true. You can also use your mobile device to run your guitar-teaching studio and be a more successful guitar teacher. This episode that we’re kicking off right now will cover five specific mobile apps that are useful for teaching guitar lessons. These are some of my favorite apps. Some of them are free and some of them cost a little bit, but they are all great.

And the apps that I mention here, today, in this episode, are going to be for the Apple iOS platform, but some of them are also going to be available on Android and Windows, but there are a few of these apps that are only available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad series of mobile devices. So, if you don’t happen to own one of those, then some of the apps you’ll be able to easily find, but others you either won’t be able to use them or you’ll have to find something similar that works on your particular platform if you use Android or Windows for your phone.

And also, you guys, this is not a comprehensive list. There are a lot of others. There are hundreds of different apps and probably some that deserve to be on this list, but you know, I had to narrow it down to five for the time limits that I have here with the podcast. So, feel free to let me know which apps you think should’ve made the list. We can talk about those in the show notes and in the comments for this episode, and you know, you can recommend your favorites to other people that listen to the episode too.

So enough of the chitchat. Let’s jump right into the five apps.

1) Evernote

The first one is an app that I’ve been using for a while and I’ve recommended before, but it’s called Evernote. Now, I’ll have links to each of these in the show notes. Evernote is a completely free app. You can do some paid upgrades to it to get additional storage space and additional sharing features, and things like that, but the free app of Evernote in its free condition and state is actually more than adequate for what most people need.

Evernote is one of my favorite mobile apps. It has literally changed the way that I work, the way that I do music, and the way that I write songs. It’s actually become an extension of my brain, believe it or not, and I have things in Evernote that I don’t have stored any place else. So, in the past, let me give you some examples. If I wanted to maybe like type up the lyrics to one of my songs or if I wanted to keep track of lesson plans for students or if I wanted to write up a to-do list, or maybe keep a list of books that I want to read, usually I would save all that stuff in a Word document or in a Google Drive doc, and then I would either keep it on my computer somewhere or I would store it in my Google account, where I could access that from my mobile phone, but not as quickly, not as easily, and it was only in one place.

What I do now is I create a note in Evernote, and you know what. It’s so much easier to find that whenever I need to find it again. I go in there and I can search from keywords and everything, every note that I have in there with those keywords pops up instantly, and it’s so cool. It’s really, really cool. You can even use Evernote to clip websites. So, you find this cool website. In the old days, we used to bookmark websites.Well, now you can just select the piece of the website that you want to keep, or the whole thing – the whole page -, and then just clip it and it’ll instantly save it into your Evernote account, into the notebook that you specify. So, it’s there anytime you want to find it in the future. Very cool stuff.

I have Evernote installed on my desktop computer, on my MacBook Pro, and I also have it on my mobile devices, on my iPad, on the phone I carry around in my pocket, and the cool thing is that if you add a note to Evernote on one of those devices, it automatically syncs it to all the rest of them. And even if you don’t have any of your devices, you can go to a web browser in an Internet cafe, log into Evernote’s website, and have access to all of your information  there. Super cool.

The best thing about Evernote really though – the syncing thing is really cool, but the really cool thing is that you can search all of your notes in seconds flat. You can add tags to your notes. You can define what each note contains. You can format everything really nice. You can save PDF files directly into Evernote and read them from there. Really cool. If you type a tag word into the search field though, it’ll bring up every note that has that word in it instantly,