Learn anywhere, anytime.

YouTube

Honestly, I think you can learn just about anything from YouTube these days. Whether it be hotwiring a car or Organic Chemistry — YouTube has tutorials on it — and music is no exception. As a guitar player myself, I am constantly searching for cool new licks to learn via YouTube. This medium is best for learning things like:

• Song Tutorials
• Licks
• Common Chord Progressions
• Music Theory

If you’re in need of any of the above, then YouTube is a great source for finding that information.

iPad Apps

The iPad is filled with cool apps for playing and learning instruments. If you’re looking to use the iPad as an instrument, then learning piano and music theory is generally what the iPad is most useful for. The fact that you can play a keyboard on the screen or plug in a midi keyboard makes it useful for learning piano. It is unrealistic to play a guitar app on the iPad and then think you can play the real thing. The feeling is far too different. But the iPad also has some great apps with lessons for those who already have an instrument and are looking for some instruction.

To list an app for every instrument would be too long of a list, so here are some of the most popular iPad apps for learning piano and guitar:

Piano

Learn Piano HD – This app is a set of video courses taught by Peter Darling. With this, you can set your iPad next to your piano and use it as your digital instructor. While it doesn’t take you into advanced piano techniques and instruction, it’s a great way to get an introduction into some of the basics of piano.

Piano Complete – If you already know the basics of piano or are just interested in practicing reading music and learning a few songs, the Piano Complete app has over 500 songs from various genres. Each song lets you choose whether you’d like to play along on it’s highlighted virtual keys with sheet music or falling notes. You can also choose whether or not you’d like to learn the right hand part, left hand part, or both.

iLearn Piano – This app gets into some more advanced piano techniques in it’s 50 lessons spanning from beginner to expert. It also teaches music theory and has a virtual keyboard to practice on.

Guitar

Learn Guitar – This app is brought to you by the same people that created the previously mentioned app, Learn Piano. This app introduces beginners to guitar through a series of 27 video lessons. While it’s not an advanced course, it is a great way for beginners to learn the basics needed to get started playing and understanding guitar.

Rock Prodigy – This app was designed by two professors and taught by guitar instructors from numerous top music schools and universities around the world. This beginning guitar app is designed like a video game to make the process of learning guitar fun and easy. It has cool features like tempo control, pitch detection to track progress, and looping. In the app’s description they say, “Think Guitar Hero®, but with real guitars, lessons, and skills. Think P90X meets Rosetta Stone for music.”

iGuitarTeacher – With 66 interactive lessons and video tutorials, this is also another great app for learning the basics of guitar.

Online Courses

There are many teachers for each instrument that have decided they could reach more students online. They’ve set up instructional courses on their websites that you can pay to take. Even top music schools, like Berklee, have put courses and certifications online for anyone to enroll in.

Here are some of the most well-known:

Berklee – As previously mentioned, Berklee is one of the most well-known music schools in the world. With an incredible staff and legendary alumni, Berklee is for musician’s looking to seriously take their skills to a new level. While the courses can be expensive, they also are worth it. Not only can you learn, but you can also earn certifications from a top school. They have courses for all fields of music, but in regards to learning an instrument you can find great instruction for piano, guitar, bass, drums, and voice.

Next Level Guitar – This is a popular online course for all levels of guitar players. In addition to numerous video lessons, they have written lessons, jam tracks, and more. They really do have some excellent videos that will help to make you sound like a pro.

Online Tools

Web apps for instruments also can make learning a new song a breeze. There are some great sites that have very interactive apps that making learning new songs and techniques fun and exciting.

Ultimate Guitar’s Tab Pro – If you’re familiar with how to read tablature, Ultimate Guitar offers a great tool for guitarists. With this tool musicians can learn any of the songs in its catalog. In addition to providing tabs, the application has looping functions, playback, and tempo control. It’s an excellent tool for learning songs and only costs $2.99/month.

Piano World Chord & Scale Generator – This tool makes it easy to generate chords and scales on a virtual piano display so that you can see which keys you need to press.

Chordbook Guitar Chord Generator – This is also a chord generator, except for the guitar. With it you can easily look up how to play the chords you need to know. You can even find inversions, add a capo, and strum it virtually to hear how the chord should sound.

Blogs

There are a ton of musicians out there dedicated to sharing their expertise with others, and many of them have sites or contribute to their favorite blogs. On these blogs they write columns and lessons on tips and techniques. Here are some top blogs for various instruments:

Ultimate Guitar – In addition to its large tablature database, this site offers a great blog with guitar tips, techniques, and lessons.

Audio Tuts – This site offers a wide variety of articles on recording, but if you look closer at two of their categories, Instrument Tutorials and Instrument Tips, you can find some more advanced articles on playing instruments.

Remember, there are a ton of great blogs out there for your specific instrument. All it takes is a quick Google search.

Digital Backing Tracks. No Band, No Problem.

Getting backing tracks to practice improvisation used to mean having to go to the music store, buy a book with a CD, and hope they had some decent jam tracks. Now you can go to digital stores like iTunes, search for something like “blues backing tracks,” and find a large selection of jam tracks to choose from. Pick and choose your favorites to download and you’re jamming in no time.

Good Ol’ Internet

Don’t forget just searching for things like “blues guitar licks,” can pull up thousands of pages with information you’re looking for. Sometimes just a quick search is all you need for a day’s lesson.

For many users, Google’s excellent cloud integration is a major feature that could drive future growth. Google Play can download music to a phone or computer from virtually anywhere, completely free of charge, while iTunes and Amazon MP3 both charged for their initial cloud service offerings. Google Play is therefore a simple, flexible option for anyone who wants to download music to multiple devices on the go.

The Android mobile operating system is perhaps Google’s biggest advantage in the digital music wars. For every one iPhone sold, four Android handsets are sold. Many of those Android devices come with Google Play preinstalled, and Android’s market share is growing; Apple’s iOS mobile operating system actually lost 1.1 percent of its market share over the last year. If Google keeps its service attractive, moderately priced and easy to use, we could see a new leader in digital music in the next few years.

Infographic by: Best Show Tickets

On October 29th, Google announced that Warner Music Group agreed to sell songs through Google’s own Play service, a mobile store available on Android devices. The announcement is by no means a surprise, but it’s an important step for the growing music service: Google now has agreements with all three major U.S. music labels.

The Big Three are Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Universal Music Group also owns the extensive catalog of EMI, which was the fourth major label before its acquisition in early 2012.

The Play store will now have a near-complete library of popular music, on par with Apple’s iTunes music store and Amazon’s Cloud Player. Amazon is Google’s more immediate competitor due to the Cloud Player’s popularity with Android users, but Google certainly has its long-term sights set on the iTunes behemoth.

Google will need a clever approach to overthrow Apple’s hold on online music sales. The NPD Group reports that iTunes had a 64 percent market share of digital music sold in the second quarter of 2012, compared to Play’s market share of less than 5 percent. However, Google’s agreement with Warner Music Group should bring some attention to the Play brand and a stronger library of songs to Android users.

Google announced the Play agreement along with new 7-inch and 10-inch Nexus tablets and a 4-inch Nexus smartphone. All three devices feature Android 4.2, the latest version of the Android operating system.

Adding the digital data was a “perfectly logical” move according to Billboard, the top music sales tracker in the United States. However, crossover artists whose songs appeal to fans of more than one genre seemed to get an especially notable boost from the changes. Some analysts argue that this dilutes Billboard’s genre designations by raising the profile of these crossover artists.

Taylor Swift, for instance, writes songs that qualify for both the country and pop charts. Because Swift’s digital singles are extremely popular with pop music listeners, her numbers on the Billboard country charts increased substantially as a result of the inclusion of digital listening data.

However, many Taylor Swift fans wouldn’t consider themselves country music fans, and digital listeners are arguably more likely to listen to single tracks from crossover artists like Swift without spending much time listening to other artists on the Billboard country charts. Critics argue that crossover artists working in popular genres can quickly rise to the top of charts with smaller listener bases.

Billboard now counts listens on services like Rhapsody, Spotify, Xbox Music and others. Many of these services work on a subscription-based format that favors singles over albums, which might also impact the Billboard charts. Some bloggers and industry analysts see these changes as artificial and problematic.

This is not the first time that Billboard has included digital downloads and listens in its charts. The popular Hot 100 chart already counts digital downloads, and two other charts, Social 50 and Digital Songs, track digital listeners specifically.

According to a chart from Statista.com, Internet radio service Pandora’s year-over-year revenue growth was outpaced by content acquisition cost growths in the second, third and fourth quarters of 2012. In a year-over-year comparison of Q2 in 2012 and 2011, for instance, Pandora’s content acquisition costs grew by about 130 percent while the company’s revenue grew by slightly less than 120 percent. Growths in costs will likely continue to exceed growth in revenue in 2013.

Spotify, a more traditional Internet streaming service, lost $26 million in 2009, $42 million in 2010 and $57 million in 2011, despite taking in sizable revenue for all three years. The high costs of music licensing makes it difficult for streaming music companies to achieve profitability.

Of course, Spotify and Pandora’s executives are completely aware of the fact that their companies are hemorrhaging cash. They justify losses with the growing popularity of their respective websites.

“The question of when we’ll be profitable actually feels irrelevant,” Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, told Swedish business journal Dagens Industri in an interview translated from Swedish to English. “Our focus is all on growth. That’s priority one, two, three four and five.”

Still, the companies’ losses are hard to ignore. For music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora to survive, they need to solve the profitability problem–and soon.

WhoSampled.com, the site that helps you add a whole new dimension to your enjoyment of music by letting you uncover the direct links between songs, is finally making the transition from your PC to your smartphone. Now you can access the site’s database using the WhoSampled iPhone app to figure out the origins of the samples in your favorite tracks no matter where you are.

The WhoSampled iPhone app does a good job of translating the most useful features from the site into a mobile application. You can easily locate all the samples, covers or remixes from the WhoSampled database that have a connection to any song in your playlist. You can even access the database for information on a song while you are still listening to it. If you find a new favorite song while tracking down the origins and influences of your music, you can add the new song to your favorites list.

It’s never been so easy to settle a bet or become the most knowledgeable music expert in the club. The new app even lets you examine two tracks at the same time. You can access samples online so you can hear them for yourself and even lets you jump right to the part of the song you are interested in. You get data about the sample itself, including information on the original track and other songs that have sampled it as well as information on exactly where to find the sample in the track and which portion of the original cut was sampled.

WhoSampled gives you access to a mind-boggling number of tracks by a variety of artists; the site boasts a database that contains close to 150,000 songs from more than 50,000 different artists. The WebSampled app gives you access to the same database as account holders, even if you don’t have an account. If you find an example that’s been left out, you can help add it to the database by registering at the website, WhoSampled.com.

At this point, you can only use the app on devices that run iOS 4.2 or higher. WhoSampled has stated that if the app takes off they have plans to develop an Android app in the future. Right now, the makers are still focusing on letting people know the app is available, and the price reflects that. For the time being, at least, you can get it for $3.15.

Jared Ficklin plays with visual representations of sound, often finding creative, artistic ways to show us how humans have an innate ability to “hear” visual waveforms and frequency diagrams.

Ficklin’s audio-visual inventions include several fire-based contraptions that intricately show how music affects physical environments. While these devices have no practical application, they’re ideal for introducing visual representations of sound in an exciting way. Ficklin also designed programs that show representations of music from different artists. The representations allow viewers to feel the music visually and could seriously improve the effects of closed-caption recordings by adding a more immersive visual element to broadcasts.

Perhaps more impressively, Jared showed a TED audience a graph of audio recordings taken at Mabel Davis skate park. Ficklin placed eight microphones around the park and logged data for about a day. By analyzing the audio signals from the park, Ficklin can accurately determine the ratio of successful to failed trick attempts. He also notes that skaters’ behavior changed markedly when an advanced skater began to perform tricks at the park. The audio analysis shows that most of the other skaters in the park altered their courses to stay perpendicular with the advanced skater and out of his way.

Ficklin’s audio analyses are sometimes artistic and breathtaking in their scope. As a tribute to legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, Ficklin made an audio graph from Hawking’s eight-hour Cambridge lecture series, making points on a three-dimensional graph that showed the start of every one of Hawking’s sentences. Ficklin then used stars to mark each point, allowing for a completely navigable 3D universe made entirely out of Hawking’s speeches.

Jared Ficklin knows that sound is powerful, and as he puts it, “sound moves in all directions, and so do ideas.” By developing our understanding of sound and how it relates to the other senses, we can find new ways to improve our communication skills and learn more about the ways that we interact with one another.

Keyboardists have an almost unlimited number of tones and effects at their disposal thanks to MIDI technology, but until recently, guitarists haven’t had the same tools. A MIDI keyboard is a pretty simple instrument to build, since digital keyboards already track input information from simple key presses. Guitarists use bends, whammy bars and other tone-changing elements, which are tough to translate to a simple digital signal.

A new project from You Rock Guitar hopes to change that. The company already introduced one extremely functional MIDI guitar, the YRG-1000, and they’re currently trying to build funding for a professional grade MIDI instrument known as the YRG-Professional.

The YGR-Pro in three different colors.

The YRG-Pro combines fret recognition and pitch recognition to give guitarists more control and a more responsive instrument overall. You Rock Guitar’s team claims that the YRG-Pro is roughly as controllable as a MIDI keyboard. If that’s true, this could be a powerful instrument for composition, recording and even live performance.

The full-size guitar features a 5-pin MIDI out, user-programmable tuning, onboard switches for MIDI mapping and even a whammy bar. Because the guitar uses standard MIDI drivers, it works well with most digital audio workstations (DAWs) and audio recording programs like ProTools, Adobe Audition and Logic. The YRG-Pro works on both Windows and Macintosh platforms, and You Rock Guitar indicates on the project’s Kickstarter page that they will update the included software regularly.

The guitar features both monophonic and polyphonic modes, which means that it can transfer digital information for full chords or single notes depending on the selected setting. The single-note setting would work well for many analog synth sounds or when soloing. There’s also a setting that limits output to one note per string at a time, which would help to prevent the output problems that plague many other MIDI guitars at the proposed $899 price level.

Backers who pledge at least $500 will receive a YRG-Pro. At the higher donation levels, backers receive customized YRG-Pro guitars with embroidered gig bags and other extras. Backers who pledge at least $2,700 can receive a YRG-Pro made by legendary luthier Roger Griffin.

When this article was written, the YRG-Pro Kickstarter Project needed another $44,000 to reach its goal and had 14 days to go. It’s a big number, but the YRG-Pro has enough innovative features to spark the curiosity of the web’s MIDI-loving guitarists.

Spotify has quickly emerged as the most popular subscription-based, streaming music service, eclipsing competitors like Rhapsody with its tremendous ease-of-use and its well-implemented social networking features. While the desktop versions of Spotify are extremely popular, the company only recently introduced an app for the world’s most popular tablet, the iPad. The new app is one of the most highly anticipated apps for the iPad, and fortunately, it’s a solidly implemented, full-featured way to experience the excellent music service.

Spotify is known for the user-friendly interface of its Windows and Mac OS programs. The company was careful not to make any dramatic changes when porting the program to the iPad, and it packs in the same features as the desktop versions. Playlists, albums and songs from a user’s Spotify library automatically show up on the iPad, providing a seamless transition to the tablet.

Some of the Spotify iPad app’s controls are customized for the iPad, and longtime iOS users should have no trouble figuring out these controls. For instance, tapping and holding a song brings up a list of options, including the ability to add a song to a playlist or add a star to it, allowing a simple way to keep track of favorites. The play, forward and back buttons also mirror the aesthetic of iTunes and Spotify’s Mac OS program.

Overall, the Spotify app is everything that a Spotify user could want and a little bit more. It allows users to easily explore the company’s massive library of albums and artists with a clever interface and intuitive controls. Features like the What’s New tab make it easy to find new music and to use the Spotify service’s social networking capabilities; users can easily find out what their friends are listening to and share album recommendations. It’s also easy to find album information and biographies about artists and bands. Tapping on a song will bring up links to Allmusic Guide, one of the web’s most popular music review websites. This makes it easy to learn about music while finding new recommendations, turning music listening into an engaging, interactive experience.

The app also boasts excellent sound and image quality. Audiophiles will appreciate the ability to download MP3s at brilliant 320 kbps bit rates, and the 500×500 resolution of the app makes album art come alive. The iPad version of Spotify also supports crossfading and gapless playback, which makes it a formidable substitute for iTunes for hardcore music fans. Users can also play songs through their home stereos with AirPlay, and for power users, this is arguably the most impressive feature. With a few minutes of easy setup, users can play thousands of high-quality songs through their home stereos. Spotify’s music library is tremendous, and the AirPlay feature alone makes the service worth the cost of a subscription for serious audio fans.

While the Spotify iPad app doesn’t introduce any major new features, it gives users everything that they love about the ubiquitous music service. It’s also free, although it requires a Spotify subscription. For users who are willing to spend the $10 a month, it offers an excellent way to enjoy the massive library and brilliant presentation of the service on an Apple iPad.

At this year’s Coachella Music Festival, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg joined the stage with one of rap music’s fallen heroes, Tupac Shakur. The same team that did the visual effects for Brad Pitt’s character in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Digital Domain Media Group Inc., were able to create a lifelike Tupac who moved about the stage, interacted with his fellow performers, and even addressed the Coachella crowd.

The performance was not pre-recorded from any of Tupac’s concerts while alive. Instead, Digital Domain studied movements and physical characteristics from Tupac’s previous performances to create something completely original.

And while some have said the performance was a product of a 3D hologram, it was actually just a 2D image. In fact, it’s a visual effects trick that dates back to 1862 when it was first used as Pepper’s Ghost in a stage interpretation of Charles Dicken’s “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London, said illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Steinmeyer on the illusion:

A.K.A. Pepper's Ghost

The effect relies on an angled piece of glass in which a “ghostly” image is reflected. “A piece of glass can be both transparent and reflective at the same time, depending on how it’s situated relative to the audience,” said Mr. Steinmeyer, pointing out the secret.

“What’s happening in Coachella is virtually the same thing that was happening in 1862,” Mr. Steinmeyer said. One difference: In the Victorian era, Pepper’s Ghost was normally used to reflect actual, physical objects or actors, making them appear “dimensional” in ways that the projected or computer-generated imagery typically used today do not.

The Tupac performance is not the first time something like that has been done either. Steinmeyer himself is responsible for bringing Sinatra back to life for a concert in 2003. And the company who owns the patent for this illusion, Musion Systems Ltd., licenses over 30 companies the rights to this technology — one of which is responsible for the animated band, The Gorillaz, performing at the 2006 Grammy Awards.

As long as this illusion has been around, it is still only the beginning for the music industry. With the success of Tupac’s Coachella performance others have caught a whiff of what a profitable and remarkable idea this is. Freddy Mercury’s optical illusion is scheduled to appear at the 10th anniversary of the musical, “We Will Rock You,” and Dre and Snoop have said they may be taking Tupac on tour with them later this year.

The implications of this are huge. Can we really bridge a generational gap by having our children see Elvis and Frank Sinatra live? And would the Beatles still be able to sell out a stadium? Let us know what you think about all this in the comments below.