Twang, it turns out, is the name of so many things. “Twang” is the name of a George Strait album, an indie band in the 80s from Manchester and Preston, England, and The Twang is also an indie rock band from Birmingham, England. Now, it’s also a 99-cent iPhone app.
With the Twang app, your iPhone/iPod Touch screen is a guitar and you get to strum the chords and pluck the strings. The app has little touch-sensitive note keys; the idea is that you put your fingers on the individual notes to play solo or on several at a time to make chords. Each time you hit a note, the app tells you what you have just played, such as C major or A minor (the same goes for chords).
For someone with the desire to learn how to play guitar but not the motivation, Twang seemed like a good place for me to start. I looked up “Twang iPhone” on YouTube like the app’s directions on iTunes told me to, and in the few videos I watched, the players made it look so easy. I know with all music (and most hard things in general) it’s kind of like that, but this actually felt easy when I tried it myself.
For starters, you can change the spacing and the reach of the fret board, which is kind of like custom making a guitar to fit your fingers and needs. You can tune your strings to different notes; also included is a little lesson on how to tune to D major and a chord chart for major tuning.
There were a couple of things I would have loved that I felt like were sorely missing from Twang. You couldn’t record the songs you wrote, and the app didn’t come with any pre-loaded songs to play along with — not even tutorial videos on how to play. Lucky for me, there is a YouTube video of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” that I could watch and play along with.
