Best Guitar Learning Apps to Start Learning Guitar: Comparison and Review

Learning to play guitar by yourself can be a daunting task. It’s not easy to find time to practice, or even know where to start. There are an overwhelming number of resources available online, which can make it not easy but very distracting and confusing to learn guitar for some absolute beginners. But with guitar learning apps, it’s never been easier!

These apps are great for beginners because they take you through the guitar learning journey step by step. You’ll learn how to read tabs, how to hold your guitar and pick properly, how to tune your guitar and more.

There are many guitar learning apps available, but these are some of our favorites:

1. Guitar Learning app by Deplike

2. Yousician

3. Simply Guitar

4. Justin Guitar

5. Fender Play

Guitar Learning app by Deplike

This app is perfect for beginners who want a free way to learn how to play their favorite songs on the guitar right away, without having to endure exercises and theory lessons. This way, it becomes a good alternative to Yousician and Simply Guitar for beginner guitar learners. It directly focuses on basic chords and strumming patterns at the beginning of the learning process, so that the users start making music on Day 1.

Guitar Learning App helps beginners of any age on their path to play their favorite songs even if they don’t have any prior knowledge or experience.

The app focuses on your wants and needs instead of a standard guitar learning curriculum. You will learn through your own personalized learning path and the app will adapt to you.

You will be able to rotate and zoom into the 3D model so that you can capture the hand positions and strumming patterns easily and clearly.

Guitar Learning App listens while you play, and gives you instant feedback to improve your technique. Your 3D coach guides you through each lesson with easy to follow step by step instructions, so you will see immediate results as you practice.

How does it work?

• Learn how to hold the guitar correctly with 3D hand and guitar models
• Learn how to tune your guitar
• Watch your 3D guitar teacher in action
• Try simplified chord and strumming patterns
• Perform the songs you love
• Make music with backing tracks
• AI-generated personal learning path

Yousician

This app is great for beginners and intermediate guitar players. It has a wide range of lessons and songs that you can choose from. You can use it as a tool to learn how to play or use it as a supplement to other lessons you may be taking as well. It is designed as a gameplay such as Guitar Hero or Rocksmith to keep the lessons more engaging. Compared to Simply Guitar, Yousician has more of a gameplay feeling to it, however, the unguided user path among so many lessons could be overwhelming for someone who’s just starting out. In that sense, Guitar Learning by Deplike and Simply Guitar demonstrate a better example of keeping the players in flow and engaged. Although the Guitar Hero style of gameplay and bouncing ball mechanics are pretty engaging, there are some flaws inside the very beginner courses that might be a little boring or off-putting for the users, such as, having to wait for a while during the song with 8 chords, so that you can play the only 2 chords that you have learned. However, once you progress above the beginner level, the real fun begins.

Simply Guitar

This app is great for those who want an easy way to learn how to play the guitar without having to read music. Instead, Simply Guitar utilizes a sliding fretboard animation with finger numbers and chord blocks slide horizontally, resembling an arcade game. It is perfect for those who have not picked up a guitar before. The app guides the users, starting from scratch, through single note playing exercises towards accompanying well-known songs with single note repetition exercises. The downside is that Simply Guitar curriculum can be a little off-putting for beginners who want fast and fun progress, or getting to play the songs they want rather quickly. Although the single note repetitions might get boring during the absolute beginner guitar player phase, the app’s interface is animated, vibrant and colorful, which might help a lot until the user gets introduced to basic chords, strumming patterns and easy song lessons with simple chords.

Justin Guitar app

Justin Guitar is another popular beginner guitar learning platform with a warm familiar face that most guitar players have come across throughout their journey, especially on the Youtube front. The face of the platform, Justin Sandercoe is a well-known guitar teaching Youtuber created his web and mobile application to provide a more holistic experience to his students.

The guitar learning Android and iOS apps by Justin Guitar basically combine the following items in one platform:

• Youtube tutorials
• Guitar pro play along
• Chord diagrams
• Tabs

Inside the video lessons of the Justin Guitar app, guitar teacher Justin Sandercoe breaks down every concept into simplified bits of information, as he does in his Youtube courses.

What sets it apart from being a mere replica of a guitar lesson Youtube channel is that the app provides a guided play-along experience after guiding the user through a set of videos.

The app consists of 2 main parts, which are the Modules and Songs.

Modules consist of guitar learning paths of each consecutive tier, each module starts teaching a guitar concept from scratch, progressing through, and ending with some songs that are directly related to the concept of each module.

Songs section inside Justin Guitar app offers a catalog of songs for the user to play along with a sliding screen showing chords and strums. Inside the play along screens, users are offered the option to practice with a modified simpler version of the songs, full backing track without the vocals and full song with the vocals included. This way, the app provides a much humanized and fun version of the basic Guitar Pro experience.

However, the main downside to Justin Guitar app is that the user experience is completely static, meaning that it doesn’t respond to the user in any way.

Learning experience in any field can be frustrating for beginners when learners are not able to comprehend whether they are on the right track or not. 

For this reason, even though Justin Guitar is able to combine the existing online guitar learning experience with different approaches into a unified user experience, it lacks the real time feedback and organic teacher response input.

How to play your favorite songs on guitar?

Guitar Learning app by Deplike offers you:

• The fastest way to learn your favorite songs
• Fun way to stay on track with with your goal
• Adaptive and guided learning path
• Bite-sized lessons adapted to you
• Visualization made  easy with 3D and AR 
• Fun, gamified practice 
• Get Instant feedback
• Fast progress 

If you want to start playing your favorite songs on guitar without going through music theory and boring exercises, then the Guitar Learning app is the perfect guide for you on your musical journey.

With the 3D and AR features, you will be able to zoom in to and rotate the 3D hand model to perfectly grasp the chord positions and strumming patterns. 

Your virtual guitar coach will be in your pocket wherever you go!