Making a musician’s life easier

TabBank and Treble.fm apps are ideal aids for musicians

With new-age musicians completely relying on technology, app makers have stepped in to make things easier for them. TabBank and Treble.fm are the latest apps launched to assist musicians.

TabBank, created by Chris Ladd, is a simple tool to help produce tablature for the guitar. Tablature is a notation system that simplifies songs down to their chords. Tablatures help a musician play almost any song with ease.

Here is how TabBank works. The musician can write down the text and add chords in brackets inside the text, for example: “Joe [D] loves [G] corn [D]”. The app then creates a properly formatted tab for easy playback, shows the structure of each chord, and lets you export it as a PDF or to other popular guitar formats. Once the tab is ready the user can play it and hear how the song will sound when played on the guitar.

Creator Chris Ladd says TabBank is the first and foremost tab editor. There are, in fact, hardly any apps on the iOS that let users edit tab, chords and lyrics at the same time. TabBank is useful for both professionals who are working on manual transcriptions and also for amateurs savings songs from online. TabBank is available on App Store.

The other app focusing on musicians launched recently is called the Treble.fm. The app aims at connecting musicians, songwriters, and producers. The app is fairly simple to use. Once a user signs up, they are directed to create a profile. Artists can create a profile and mark the musical category they belong to such as sound engineering, singer, or the specific instruments they play. They can then search for other musicians to collaborate with. From there they can select up to three artist roles such as producer, DJ and engineer. Artists can also link their social accounts, including their SoundCloud account, so that other artists using the app can listen to their work. Unlike other music-related apps that are quite cluttered, Treble.fm is clean. For example: a user’s bio, socials, SoundCloud songs, and connect button are all on one clean-looking page. Everything is integrated so the user does not have to leave the app. Founded by Matt Bond, Treble.fm acknowledges it isn’t the first company to come up with an app to connect musicians, but the difference here is that Treble.fm is created by musicians with tech backgrounds. Treble.fm is currently available on App Store.