Apps

I use one called UkuleleTabs (Android)
 
I got my new Kindle, and I like it. Especially for the price, as I bought it from Best Buy on the special of the day. First thing, if one does not have good eyes, it is a little small. I have good eyes for an old man, so it works perfect. I actually like that I can slip it into the big leg pocket of my cargo shorts. There is all my music, in my pocket. How convenient is that? But I installed the MobileSheets app and it works very well. I like it a lot. I had a bunch of songs in an odt. format, and I had to change them to PDFs to import them from drop box, but that was pretty easy. Still working on the auto scroll, but I think it is going to work. But I also installed the Ultimate Guitar app. Ultimate Guitar is the first place I go when I want to find a song and I get along well with the site, but the app is incredible. I have hundreds of thousands of songs at my finger tips. I can change them to whatever key I want in a moment. At this point, I can play darn near any request anyone wants to throw at me. Most every song has a ukulele version, and the chords are shown in a popup at the bottom, so if by chance a song has a chord or two that I don't know, bam, I pull up the chord charts and learn it on the fly, right then and there.
 
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I got my new Kindle, and I like it. Especially for the price, as I bought it from Best Buy on the special of the day. First thing, if one does not have good eyes, it is a little small. I have good eyes for an old man, so it works perfect. I actually like that I can slip it into the big leg pocket of my cargo shorts. There is all my music, in my pocket. How convenient is that? But I installed the MobileSheets app and it works very well. I like it a lot. I had a bunch of songs in an odt. format, and I had to change them to PDFs to import them from drop box, but that was pretty easy. Still working on the auto scroll, but I think it is going to work. But I also installed the Ultimate Guitar app. Ultimate Guitar is the first place I go when I want to find a song and I get along well with the site, but the app is incredible. I have hundreds of thousands of songs at my finger tips. I can change them to whatever key I want in a moment. At this point, I can play darn near any request anyone wants to throw at me. Most every song has a ukulele version, and the chords are shown in a popup at the bottom, so if by chance a song has a chord or two that I don't know, bam, I pull up the chord charts and learn it on the fly, right then and there.

Which Kindle model did you get?
 
I love being able to carry around all my music digitally. I long ago tired of lugging binders. I've realized that I'm not likely to be able to keep more than a dozen songs in my head at any one time, so having a tablet with me frees me up to play anything I want. I got onsong very long ago, and I'm sure there are lots of other good apps, but I'm satisfied with it for lead sheets. I like how easy it is to edit to get exactly what you want in terms of display (color, day/night, font, etc) and also organization (set lists, genre,etc). I use bracketed chords [] in-line, bold and colored. This saves space, allowing me to put most songs on one page and is still easy to see. This format also keeps chords in the right place and you don't get that crazy formatting thing where chords move themselves ( esp.. impt. when sharing music).

I've gone back and forth on auto-scroll use. It works if you remember to hit it when you start a song. I now leave myself a sticky at the top of a lead sheet so that I remember that a song is longer than one page (that's rare, as I'm usually able to get most songs on one page.

I jam with guitarists, many of which use small air-turn pedals and there are a few advantages to them. Mainly they are nice to be able to have greater control on your page turning. Like if there are a lot of solo breaks that can vary the time of the song, then the pedal is nice. Also, if your vision is not great, you can use a really large font and let your songs go onto multiple pages. Also, this can be helpful if you find that you lose your place easily, jumping back from v. to ch. or otherwise navigating a song that you have condensed. Instead you can just keep the piece in its long version, writing in the parts that repeat within the song, instead of having to follow directions and jumping around. I don't do this right now, but I see the usefulness of the pedal, especially if my eyes get any worse. The alternate would be to get a much larger tablet. For now, I'm ok with the mostly one page format and keeping my accessories to a minimum but I can see a time when a pedal might be the ticket.
 
The above post by bunnyf is almost exactly my response. I have an iPad Mini and I use onSong for my song charts. When I started playing uke I wanted lots of features in my music reader but I soon realized I never used those features. I create simple pdf files for my music and make every effort to keep them to one page. For now I can display a whole page on my Mini but as my eyes get worse I'll probably use the autoscroll feature and enlarge the image.

I like good old fashioned paper products but like many other posters above I'm really happy to be able to carry around all of my music, magazines, books, videos etc in the pocket of my cargo pants or in my briefcase.
 
But I also installed the Ultimate Guitar app. Ultimate Guitar is the first place I go when I want to find a song and I get along well with the site, but the app is incredible. I have hundreds of thousands of songs at my finger tips. I can change them to whatever key I want in a moment. At this point, I can play darn near any request anyone wants to throw at me. Most every song has a ukulele version, and the chords are shown in a popup at the bottom, so if by chance a song has a chord or two that I don't know, bam, I pull up the chord charts and learn it on the fly, right then and there.


Rllink, I'd love to hear more about this app. I've thought about downloading it on several occasions but I really can't figure out the payment models. The reviews are split between people who love it and people who feel the pricing scale is deceptive. I understand it's for use on one device and have no problem with that. I'm just wondering, if I pay the lifetime subscription am I done? Sounds like a silly question but some of the reviews would lead you to believe that's not the case. Overall the good reviews seem to outshine the complaints about subscriptions but it would be nice to hear from someone who has (and likes) the app. Thanks!
 
Tammy and I just bought 2nd hand iPads, so we can utilize Onsong too. We ordered mic stand holders so we can see the pads and sing/strum too. Just like bunny wrote, we have had a lot of trouble with chords squirreling themselves into the wrong places when sending them to pdf. I hope it will save us a lot of time, plus doing away with the inconvenience of lugging songbooks around.
 
As I said, I use onsong but I do also have ultimate guitar app. I bought this many years ago. I think a lifetime membership then was a one time payment of $12. Things have changed over the years and now they have a pro package that unlocks features that I don't have. Some looked cool but Once I got onsong, I didn't use UG much anymore. Weirdly, when I occasionally go on UG now, it asks me if I want to buy a lifetime membership. I think it really is just trying to tell me I should upgrade. Anyway, I noticed that it now takes much longer for the app to open for me (maybe a punishment for not going pro). Onsong came out a bit after UG and has features that I prefer to UG. I like to be able to edit as I see fit. I want to get stuff on one page usually and get my font big. UG is too small for me to read. I also like onsongs organizational tools. I still go to UG sometimes to double check a few different version of songs against one that I may have found on another site. They do have the most complete library. You can't cut and paste though to your onsong or other library from UG, so I just really use UG as a reference source.
 
Rllink, I'd love to hear more about this app. I've thought about downloading it on several occasions but I really can't figure out the payment models. The reviews are split between people who love it and people who feel the pricing scale is deceptive. I understand it's for use on one device and have no problem with that. I'm just wondering, if I pay the lifetime subscription am I done? Sounds like a silly question but some of the reviews would lead you to believe that's not the case. Overall the good reviews seem to outshine the complaints about subscriptions but it would be nice to hear from someone who has (and likes) the app. Thanks!
I bought the MobileSheets pro for $12.99, the price of a book full of songs that I don't care to play, so I don't consider that expensive. I don't know about subscriptions. It is an app, so I just bought it. I don't think that I bought a subscription to it. Because it is an Amazon Kindle that I'm putting it on, I just went to the Amazon app store, found it, and clicked on install. Amazon charged my credit card $12,99 for it, just like buying any app. It works pretty well. The auto scroll is tricky and everyone advised me of that when I bought it, so that was not a surprise. Like everything, there are limitations and it takes a bit of time experimenting and playing with it to learn all the features. But over all, it is working fine. I will probably go to a bluetooth page turner eventually though. It likes PDFs and it works well with them. I did not realize that I can turn almost any document into a PDF by going to the print menu and picking "save as PDF" instead of hitting print. Then I save it to the MobileSheets. That makes it very convenient to put songs that I find on line to the MobileSheets, as most of the sites that I find songs on have a print option and I can save them from there. I read the reviews and got a lot of advise from other musicians. Like everything, if you want to spend time figuring out what it won't do, you will eventually find things that it won't do. If you want to take the time to get to know the app, you will find that there is a lot that it will do. That is about all the advise I have on it at this point.
 
Rllink, I'd love to hear more about this app. I've thought about downloading it on several occasions but I really can't figure out the payment models. The reviews are split between people who love it and people who feel the pricing scale is deceptive. I understand it's for use on one device and have no problem with that. I'm just wondering, if I pay the lifetime subscription am I done? Sounds like a silly question but some of the reviews would lead you to believe that's not the case. Overall the good reviews seem to outshine the complaints about subscriptions but it would be nice to hear from someone who has (and likes) the app. Thanks!

I've paid for Guitar Pro on Android and iOS, and it still wants money every time I use it. I even paid twice on Android! It's hard to believe this isn't deliberate. Their content is all user generated, though they pay the licensing fees. I quit using it.
 
I like good old fashioned paper products but like many other posters above I'm really happy to be able to carry around all of my music, magazines, books, videos etc in the pocket of my cargo pants or in my briefcase.
That is why I'm going the direction I am. I keep accumulating and accumulating. I'm not going to become one of those ukulele players that shows up with a shopping cart full of stuff in tow. Several people have told me that they think the Kindle is too small to be practical, but the Kindle fits in my cargo pants pocket. In fact, yesterday I was wearing my Carhart work pants and found that I could stick it in the back pocket of those. That is important to me.
 
I've paid for Guitar Pro on Android and iOS, and it still wants money every time I use it. I even paid twice on Android! It's hard to believe this isn't deliberate. Their content is all user generated, though they pay the licensing fees. I quit using it.

I didn't realize that photoshooter was talking about the ultimateguitar app. I got that off the Amazon app store too. I paid $7.99 for that and I don't think it is "pro". But still, that is a lot less than a book with a half dozen songs in it. I also didn't see anything about it being a subscription. There was no pricing structure, it was just $7.99. Maybe I'm using something different. I go to the ultimateguitar.com site on my laptop a lot. It is my go to site for songs, so I bought the app. I like the app well enough. It works well for what I am doing with it, but I do not utilize a lot of the features. I find songs and either put them in my dropbox or I put them on MobileSheets. I've also been saving them on the app itself. So maybe there is something about the app that I don't know, but so far so good. I've been using it.
 
As I said, I use onsong but I do also have ultimate guitar app. I bought this many years ago. I think a lifetime membership then was a one time payment of $12. Things have changed over the years and now they have a pro package that unlocks features that I don't have. Some looked cool but Once I got onsong, I didn't use UG much anymore. Weirdly, when I occasionally go on UG now, it asks me if I want to buy a lifetime membership. I think it really is just trying to tell me I should upgrade.

I've paid for Guitar Pro on Android and iOS, and it still wants money every time I use it. I even paid twice on Android! It's hard to believe this isn't deliberate. Their content is all user generated, though they pay the licensing fees. I quit using it.

I didn't realize that photoshooter was talking about the ultimateguitar app. I got that off the Amazon app store too. I paid $7.99 for that and I don't think it is "pro". But still, that is a lot less than a book with a half dozen songs in it. I also didn't see anything about it being a subscription. There was no pricing structure, it was just $7.99. Maybe I'm using something different.

Thanks for all the feedback. This is consistent with the reviews I read online. Some people love it, some have limited use and it fills the need, and some complain about the pricing/subscription model.
On iOs the app is free to download and install. The free version seems to be essentially the UG website in app form. Then there are all sorts of very confusing payment options. This is what has kept me away from the app and will likely continue to keep me away. Too bad, looks like it could be useful.
 
The thing I don't like about saving things as PDFs is that you can't edit. You also can't use the transpose feature after you save as a PDF. Fine if you know you are always gonna play in one key, but sometimes when playing out with others you want to transpose on the fly and without an Internet connection.
 
Did a search on google play for "ukulele" and all kinds of interesting apps came up. Can anyone make recommendations? I'd like an app to compile music and a song writer app that is uke friendly. Anyone have a favorite app or know one that would be handy for beginners?
here are some best apps list

Uke Like The Pros App
The Ukulele App
Real ukulele
Yousician
Ukulele Companion
iUke
My Ukulele
Ukulele Toolkit
Ukulele Tabs and Chords
Ukulele Tuner
All of these applications are fun, functional tools that can assist you in your ukulele journey. The vast majority of them are free, with in-app purchases, so that you can get a taste of what they offer before spending your hard earned money. With all of these options available we have no excuses not to practice!
 
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Hey Ethanmiles2,

Thanks for updating this old thread on Ukulele Apps. I'll check them out.
 
An app that I’ve been enjoying lately is Strum Machine. Just enter the chords and it will play a backup track for you. You can adjust the speed, change key, etc. It’s great for practicing soloing. It has a library or songs already done for you (mostly bluegrass, trad, country) but it’s a piece of cake to enter your own songs.
 
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