The Complete Irish Bouzouki App by Declan Plummer

 Declan from Top Score Music Academy made a new web-app. In this video he shows how it works and what it can do. Have a look for yourself. If you tried it please comment what you think about it.

Note-orious App - Find the notes on the fretboard

Note-orious is an app/game which helps you to learn the notes on the fretboard. It cost approx. 2€. You can use it for a lot of stringed instruments, also for GDAD tuning. It's fun playing around with it and it really helps to get to know the fretboard.

It is available for iPhone, iPad, Mac (Catalina and higher). Sorry not for Windows or Android. 

 

Website: https://note-orious.app

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1524820711 

 

Fretter, another chordfinder for iPhone

This might be just another chord finder for iOS. It costs 1,79€ which I think is ok. To get chords for bouzouki just select mandolin and tuning custom. Then click on top right button custom and select your tuning. 

In Normal mode you can define chords and the app shows them to you. In reverse mode you can define chords on the fretboard and fretter gives you the name for the chord. This does not funktion always. For example 2400 gives you no name.

There is a free version available, so just try it. They say the free version is only limited in chord recognition, so bouzouki must be available.

information: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/04/fretter-takes-guesswork-chords

developer site: http://fretterapp.com

Chordpro buddy

Some time ago I bought this program for MAC on the app store. I was looking for a program to edit my songs with chords and a way to transmit them to the iPad.

This is what the developer's say:

ChordPro Buddy is an easy to use and elegant song editor for the Apple Mac OS-X operating system. With it you will easy edit, format, transpose, play and print lyrics, chords and tabs. It is an ideal and elegant tool for guitar players or other musicians. The storage format is the widely used, very simple and easy understandible "ChordPro" text format.

And I think, it is worth the money. If you find songs with chords above on the internet just copy them and import them to ChordPro Buddy. It will automatically transform the chords to brackets whithin the song text. This will give you the benefit to transpose the songs later, if you open them on the iPad. 

But how do you transmit them? That's really easy. Just send them to dropbox. You should create a new folder in your dropbox, in which you store all of your songs. You can even create subfolders. 

On your iPad you should use the app "Songbook". This app can connect to your dropbox account. Everytime you open it it updates from your Dropbox account, so you're up to date with your songs. 

Here's a video tutorial

And here's the product page:
http://www.gfapps.com/chordprobuddy/

And this is a tutorial for SongBook ChordPro



I will write a post for this iPhone/iPad app later.

Musichord 3.0 - Chords for Bouzouki

If you are looking for a program which is able to show chords and much more have a look at this:

http://www.rpsoft2000.com/music/mandolin-chord.htm

Here's what they say on the website:

If you have a mandolin, cittern or bouzouki and are looking for a chord reference for its specific tunings, we believe that Musicord 3.0 is very much the right place to look. Musicord 3.0 will handle string instruments of 4, 5 or 6 "courses" of strings. By "course" we mean sets of either one string, a string pair, or a string triplet. The actual image shows the "courses" (fingering positions) and not all of the strings for multi-string instruments as mandolins, bouzoukis and citterns. So an 8 string mandolin or an 8 string bouzouki will each be displayed as a 4 string instrument. A ten string cittern will be displayed as a five string instrument.

Both right hand viewing and left hand viewing is available. Also "capo" or bar fingering down the neck or fretboard of the instrument. Many presets are available for what we understand may be the more common tuning for mandolins, bouzoukis and citterns. If none of these preset string tunings work for you, Musicord also allows setting up a custom string tuning - and even the save of a set of custom tuned stringed instruments to be used later.

Unfortionally this programm isn't available for MAC-users. So I did not test it. If you have got any experience with this program please leave a comment.

Chord Finder

You want to know how to shape a special chord on your instrument? Well, let's have a look at the chord finder at
http://4stringchords.com/
You specify the tuning and there you go.

ABC Convert-A-Matic

This is a fine online converter. Just paste ABC-Files into it and you'll get notation or midi files out of it.
http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html

Chordhouse

A site for guitarists, but you can use the advanced guitar room for bouzouki, too. Custom tunings are possible. Look for scales, notes etc on the fretboard.

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/



Example for Bouzouki D major scale. Now you can figure out possible chord shapes.

Acoustic Music Webtools

Mark Klan provides us with a lot of little tools to help us make our musician's life a little bit easier.

ChordSpell, NoteFind, ChordMatch and CapoCalc are the names of the tools. Have a look at them and tell me if you find it useful.






ChordSpell: If you play a chord and don't know what http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifit is ChordSpell can help you.
http://www.markabout.com/tools/csgf/csgfset.htm

NoteFind: You want to know where the notes are on your fretboard?
http://www.markabout.com/tools/notefind/nfset.htm

ChordMatch: You are trying to find correct chords to a melody and stuck? Try this little helper.
http://www.markabout.com/tools/chordm1.htm

CapoCalc: You have a capo on and want to calculate the chords to play?
http://www.markabout.com/tools/capocalc.htm


http://www.markabout.com/tools/

Webtips

Some links that might be useful for players of the irish bouzouki:

• my own website:
  www.fm-shabba.de
  
  


• a friend of mine, Tom Bloch, he plays a Heiner Dreizehnter guitar shaped bouzouki and a Dreizehnter Mandolin. On his website he provides a good tutorial about crosspicking and some bouzouki papers.
  www.irish-like.com
  
  


• the great french site of Jean Banwarth. You can download a chord-dictionary for GDAE tuning for free:
  http://banwarth.free.fr/engbouz.htm
  
  


• Han Speeks fantastic Site for the irish bouzouki: http://www.xs4all.nl/~hspeek/bouzouki/
  
  
  
• Jonathan Tilly, a french site with lots of information and instructional videos:
  http://cbom.free.fr/ie.htm
  
  
  
• Dominique Riviere has got some great tabs for Guitar and Zouk: http://riviere.auzeau.org/
  
  


• The Yahoo based "Cittern list". Here you can find help or information and get in contact with other players of CBOM-instruments: http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/cittern/
  
  


• Heiner Dreizehnter, a famous German Luthier, he built my new Bouzouki: http://www.irish-bouzouki.com/
  
  


• Citterns on ice, a compilation of Songs featuring the CBOM-family instruments with downloadable mp3 files: http://netserver.massmedia.com/~mikeb/cittern/coi1/tunes.html
  
  
  
• Anthony de Waals website:
  http://www.xs4all.nl/~cittern/index.htm
  
  
  
• Kierons fantastic Andy Irvine fan-site. You'll find there information about zouks, too: http://www.chinatogalway.com/
  
  
  
• Fretted Friends ebay shop. You can buy a great GDAD Chord bible: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/fretted-friends-music
  
  
  
• John McGann has written a book on the bouzouki:
  http://www.johnmcgann.com/om.html
  
  
  
• Folk of the wood octave mandolin lessions: http://www.folkofthewood.com/page5298.htm
  
  
  
• Terry Blankenship has recorded lots of songs on his zouk. You can listen to them here:
  http://www.mp3.com.au/album.asp?id=1206
  this is his website:
  http://home.cinci.rr.com/terryblankenship/index.html
  
  
  

That's a lot for the beginning, isn't it? If you got any further links let me know.