Becoming a self-taught rockstar has never been easier! Let’s take a look at these top-rated guitar teacher apps to find the tool you need to achieve your goals.

Every app has its own specialty, depending on what you need to work on and where you are as a guitar learner.

Most of these are pay to use apps, however many allow you to use them for free and then only pay for premium features. Let’s start with the free apps first.

Yousician

Price: Free

Yousician is a gamified music learning app that literally looks like a video game.

You can see the notes go by literally as you would see them go by in a game like ‘Guitar Hero’ or ‘Rock Band’, except you get to use your real instrument.

The app works with more instruments than just guitar as well—bass, piano, ukelele and even singing!

One really cool thing about this app is that it gives you real-time feedback on where your weaknesses are.

Another interesting feature is that if you’re in a rush, you can enter the amount of time you have to practice and the program will offer you a lesson that works with your time constraints.

You start on different paths, just like in a video game. You can choose from lead, rhythm, and theory, and it provides a series of lessons from there. You can download it for Mac and PC, as well as in an app version for Android and Apple devices.

The game works by playing you a backing track, and as the music plays, a tab notation scrolls past on a fretboard.

You advance by earning points and passing the exercises.  One of the greatest things about Yousician is that you don’t require anything more than a guitar and a microphone (the one that is built-in on your phone already will work) on your device or computer.

The app will process the sound of your guitar and will tell you if the notes that you are playing are correct, even when the music gets more complicated and hectic.

This is by far the most immersive experience by a guitar learning app that really takes you by the hand and engages you in a different way.

Guitar Lessons by Guitar Tricks

Price: Free

Guitar Lessons by Guitar Tricks is a free app on both iPhone and Android. This app is a series of guitar lessons by professional teachers.

Simply start at lesson one and begin watching the videos, learn how to do chords, scales, solos, everything you need! And it all comes from the great professionals at GuitarTricks.com

This is a great app if you learn best by watching videos of someone doing it in order to get the technique down faster.

Jam Up by Positive Grid

Price: Free version with upgrades. Hardware sold separately.

This app is mainly for creating an amp and recording station out of your iPad or iPhone. Once you’ve learned to play a bit consider checking out this app.

You can plug your guitar right in and get access to thousands of effects and tones. It also works as an 8 track recorder. So you can record loops, of chords, say, and then learn to play over them.

Paid apps

Okay now let’s go for the paid apps. Sometimes these may seem like a gamble, but we promise these will be worth your money.

Chord by Thomas Grapperon

Price: $4.99

The chord app is an app that is jam-packed full of useful information—including chord charts and fingerings for tons of instruments such as guitar, bass, ukelele, mandolins.

It will also suggest scales so that you can learn to improvise over chord changes.

The thing I really love about this app is you can compose your own songs and the app will play them back for you. You can even include your lyrics.

You can even import the chords of another song and modify the lyrics or even shift the music.

The app is loaded with functionality like exporting your songs as PDFs, fully-featured fingering diagrams, and more.

Ninebuzz app

Price: $4.99

Ninebuzz is a great dynamic learning tool. Every beginner guitarist should know about this one.

It has the typical things you would expect, scales, chord charts, modes. It also has a section where you can learn different licks—which are useful if you have been practicing scales but don’t know where to take them.

The thing I really like about this app is you can play along to real drums and you can download different beats to play along to. This is one of the things many apps fail to implement, a way to play along as if you were jamming with another person.

Compatible with the iPod, iPad and iPhone.

Tab Toolkit by Agile Partners

Price: $3.99

Tab Toolkit is an outstanding tool for guitar players who use tablature for reading and creating music.

Above the tablature, you have a fretboard so you can see the notes on the guitar and a musical notation grid so you can learn how to read actual music notation as well.

You can use this app to publish your own personal sheet music from programs such as Power Tab or Guitar Pro.