Apps, Mobile & SMS

Spotted At TechCrunch Disrupt: Songful – An iOS Based Virtual Guitar App

Screen Shot 2012-09-11 at 1.23.36 AMEver since video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band made their
splash on the console market and allowed everyday people to feel like actual skilled
musicians, the whole idea of creating music while mimicking the motions of
playing a real instrument became increasingly popular. Many seemed to draw satisfaction
from simply following on-screen commands to trigger an instrument’s feel,
without any of the actual legwork of learning chords or reading music. One
company showcasing at this week’s TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in San Francisco
is InstruMagic, who decided to create a virtual guitar app that gives users the
ability to “play” thousands of songs in a simple and easy-to-use iPhone and
iPad application.


The app is called Songful, and it is the creation of Tel-Aviv
based music app developer instruMagic. The company recently partnered up with
Ultimate Guitar, a leading online community of guitar enthusiasts, to allow
users to play any of the hundreds of thousands of songs that are available on
Ultimate-Guitar.com. Based on instruMagic's "ZAP Guitar" technology,
Songful creates a guitar-playing experience that they say is equally engaging
for musicians and non-musicians alike.

Watch Soulful's "ZAP Guitar" technology in action below:

“Combining Ultimate Guitar's huge database of licensed chords and
lyrics with instruMagic's technology creates a compelling app for an untapped
audience of guitar enthusiasts who never mastered the instrument, as well as
guitar players that can take their 'songful' guitar with them anywhere,"
said instruMusic CEO Eyal Eldar.

As expected, a user doesn’t actually have to know how to play
guitar at all in order to play the songs downloaded via the Songful app, but it
does help if you already know the basic layout of a song. For instance, you’ll
be able to better move your fingers in the approximate rhythm of the song and
be more prepared for chord changes, but the app does all the tuning, chord
changes, and note changes for you. All the user has to do is trigger them.

InstruMagic says that they’ll be launching the app at the end of
this month. To learn more and get in touch with instruMagic, click here

Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House and an independent musician. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud

Share on: