Gibson is synonymous with guitars, so we had high hopes for the Android app that bears its name. Actually, it’s a bit of a mishmash of the other types of apps we review on these pages, but certainly has its uses. See Android Smartphone reviews

There are plenty of dedicated guitar tuners and apps that show you which strings to strum and hold for each chord. Gibson does both these things, with a vertical list of open and barre chords that you click on to view the fingering for. Images were rather fuzzy, denoting an app first made for a smaller screen rather than for a tablet. See Google Android Tablet reviews

The tuner couldn’t be simpler: choose between single notes and chromatic tuning and the sort of tuning you need, then press the green start button on the tuner to see how well your guitar strings are tuned. A needle shows you which way to turn your pegs.

The metronome is our most frequent port of call. It has a dropdown list of standard time signatures, a bpm dial and lets you tap out your own tempo. The metronome arm can be set to operate with or without a ‘chink’.

The lessons seem like a bolt on to the elements of the app we’ve just described. They are links to lengthy YouTube videos that Gibson presumably recorded some time ago and deemed useful inclusions in an app. Gibson sells music tuition DVDs separately, so they may be from this.

You need a web connection to stream each video – nowhere near as satisfactory as the Music Makers saxophone app we tried. The lessons are less focused and quite verbose compared with the informative to camera approach of the Jools Holland app series, too.

Verdict

There’s certainly enough in Gibson Guitar for Android, but it’s less polished than GarageBand and it’s individual elements don’t knit together as well as other apps here.