I bought this on the praise it received.
The one bad review talking about how you have to enter chords before you can put single notes is mostly right.
This makes this app more accustomed to people who play acoustic, focus on chord music and picking (bar)chords instead of power chords and heavy riffs. It is possible but then youd have to go program all the power chords which is a single shape in multiple positions. Will take a couple of minutes before youre notating. That said the entry method is really REALLY fast. So easy to create a bar of many notes in literally seconds.
The only thing I cant figure out is why the only preset is G major. Im sorry, I know the app is a dollar. In all keys in major and minor there should be 14 sets of 7 chords. Theres only 1. Thats 13 keys you get to program yourself, and this doesnt address sharps or flats either, This also doesnt address various modes, 7th chords or diminished chords either. I didnt see any in the preset but you can create them yourself if you know your chords.
It almost needs a chord chart you can pick chords from as all you get is 7 chords when you buy it. I know my chords, I just dont want to have to plug them all in before tabbing a song, and some riffs are scale based not chord based which makes this challenging, to tab out anything not played in chords.
So I see what he is saying. If I want to write a song in anything but G major I have to enter all 7 chords of that key and not enough chord buttons for variations like sus2 or 7th. Like I said I know the app is a $1 but it seems lazy to give people G Major and after that its program the chord charts yourself.
Its an amazing app and once you have the chords, strumming or picking notes goes soooooo fast. But if you really really want to wow people include the other 13 keys someone can play in.
There has to be some music logic you can program in to just transpose your G major to A major etc. then do a minor set, and transpose those,
Any lazy person is just going to write in G major for the rest of their lives. Also the ability to put in lyrics would be fabulous, but I realize its a tab app.
I guess what Im saying is the app makes you do most of the work.
There is one preset key, and the notes for those chords in G major is all you have to work with unless you start plugging in the chords yourself, which is time consuming.
If you have a riff where the note goes half step up, you waste a chord slot just to include that note. Needs some work, still definitely worth a buck. Great app, but it needs more versatility key wise without making the paying customer program half the app.
Matthew28 about Tab Builder, v1.3.3