What it is: A toolkit of helpful music utilities
Who it’s for: Singers, guitarists, and musicians of all levels
Cost: Free to use; $2/month or $30/lifetime unlocks everything
What makes it special: Thoughtful design with no bloat
Music Tools is a suite of utilities for singers and musicians – tuner, metronome, piano keyboard, and pitch players – built by a solo developer who initially made it to help out at his choir. You’d never know it started as a side project, considering its superb presentation and attention to detail. I love spotlighting indie apps that deserve more recognition, and this is an app that has knocked industry giant Fender off my Home Screen. Let me tell you why.
For me, the headline tool is the tuner, and after testing a lot of alternatives, it’s the one I’ll be using going forward. It works consistently well and the display bubbles visually pulse with the tone of your string, which is a lovely touch that reminds me of Apple’s Dynamic Island animations. It covers guitars, bass, ukulele, and custom instruments. There are also passive pitch players for singers who prefer to tune by ear, again thoughtfully implemented with elegant minimalism.
Beyond the tuner, there’s a full-screen metronome with Live Activity support so you can control tempo from the Dynamic Island while you browse for sheet music, and a clean piano keyboard that launches straight from Control Center. The piano keyboard isn’t going to compete with GarageBand for voices and effects, but that’s not the point – it’s a minimal, no-cruft implementation with a clever rubber band gesture that lets you swipe between octaves while you’re playing.
The app itself is a single scrollable screen where every tool is immediately usable, with a full-screen option whenever you need more focus. Immediacy seems to have been a focus for this developer, with no extra taps needed to get started, no login screens or ads or pointless menus. The Home Screen widgets get you there even faster, some of which are near 1:1 interactive copies of the tools themselves, with the more complex stuff like the tuner quick-launching into the app.
Some of those widgets, along with Lock Screen and Control Center integration, are locked behind a paywall of $2/month or $30/lifetime – a very reasonable ask when the free tier is so useful.
My own musical talents are limited to occasional noodling on the guitar, so I can’t speak to any obvious blind spots in the app. But what’s included here is so thoughtfully put together that I can only assume the target audience of musicians will get the appeal immediately.