Author – Create and Edit Tabs
A music-writing app that fails musicians
Free Developer Ultimate Guitar, ultimate-guitar.com Platform iPad Requirements iOS 9 or later
Feel like being an unpaid content provider? Then Author is the app for you. It’s designed so that you can painstakingly create guitar tab sheets and chord sequences of other people’s songs for the 12-million-member Ultimate Guitar website.
So, can you import from other notation apps or file formats? Nope. Can you export your tabs and chords to any other location or app? Nope. Can you use the app to write down your own songs to share with others? Nope. Can you use the app to learn songs other people have contributed? Nopety-nope-nope-McNope.
What that means is that unless you’re really keen on sharing things with the Ultimate Guitar community, then the app’s features are largely useless. That’s a shame, because it’s very well designed. Creating tablature is simple, and in addition to the good old-fashioned “put this finger there” approach you can also specify ghost notes, artificial harmonics, palm muting, and other key techniques.
The app also ties in with Apple Music and enables you to play songs as you work out what the guitarist is doing, and in another nice touch the Chords option automatically grabs the lyrics to save you time. The problem is that the focus on Ultimate Guitar means the app is effectively pointless for anything else. As a result, Author is little more than a website’s content management system.
the bottom line. If you’re an Ultimate Guitar contributor you’ll like this a lot. And if you aren’t, you won’t.