Harmony City: Learn chords

Harmony City allows you to learn how to play your instrument, tune it with the microphone on your device, as well as accessing a wide range of songs that continue to be developed and added into the library. 

Once you have learned your chords via the tutorial, the microphone checks you can play the chords accurately, before you then play alongside a song, gaining points and stars to develop your skills and check your understanding. You can then return back to the video tutorials if you haven’t quite grasped the skill yet. The app also allows you to develop your skills through different levels, so that it starts you off with slightly simpler chords and transitions, before becoming more complex. It is compatible with iPhone and iPad, iPod Touch and Mac, and requires iOS 10.0 or later. Harmony City is one of our recommended guitar learning app for students.

The app is free to download and provides you with some free tutorials and songs automatically. You can then pay a subscription to access the full app, although the free version is a great introduction to the instrument and the app itself. There are in app purchases, by selecting the subscription service with a wide range of songs and levels. There are no adverts within the app. It develops skills in performance, building repertoire, and allows solo instruments to play alongside an accompaniment that can easily be personalised to their skill set.

What we love about Harmony City?

What we love about the Harmony City app, is the opportunity of building the performer’s repertoire through a very wide array of pieces. Not only this, but it allows freedom and independence to build your skills, and the learner is easily scaffolded by the supporting accompaniment. I also love that it helps students to understand why you need to tune an instrument, and how to do this, as well as providing its own internal tuner.

The real strength of this app is the ability to cover a wide range of skills, and the embedding of a large volume of video tutorials to help the students to understand, before applying their knowledge through play. Another real strength is the ability to learn either the ukulele or guitar within the same app, demonstrating the transferable skills and knowledge. This is ideal for students and performers from the age of 5, who are building their skills to a higher level. The app is surprisingly complex, recognising the development of levels, and being able to recognise the accuracy of chords.

Is Harmony City easy to use?

Harmony City App is very easy to use as it instantly starts with a tutorial, and leads you through each process step by step, with instructions, activities, and very clear visual imagery to help you to understand how to navigate through the app. However, it would be lovely to be able to see your pathway through the different levels through a journey, so that you can see what you are aiming for, and what might come next. That said, this might be an opportunity for future development, but does not detract from the fantastic potential of this app.

Students benefit through a developed repertoire of music and a more successful opportunity of building their array of music, which can often be hindered by a lack of ability to play alongside an accompaniment, which is often something that musicians get little opportunity of doing. Teachers benefit from this greatly, as it offers the support and differentiation required for some students on a more complex level, allowing teachers to be more effective in their delivery without having to create the resources themselves, and students to become more independent.

As this app is available on the iPhone and Android phones, this also allows students to access this remotely from home, and continue their learning without needing to have a teacher in front of them. This is particularly ideal in a primary setting where teachers are often not music specialists, and therefore would be helpful to use in front of the whole class.

How much does Harmony City App cost?

The app is free, and provides a some tutorials and songs straight away. There is also a subscription service which has a range of costs, e.g. to pay for a whole year would cost £68.99 

What is the overall rating?

The app is very safe to use. I would rate the app as 5 stars out of 5, as it does exactly what it states, and has excellent design and focus.

What can Harmony City App improve on?

Harmony City App really has some outstanding features, although there are some small niggles that could be developed or considered. Firstly, it says in the detailed instructions on the App store that you need to use headphones to use this app properly – this is an area that children wouldn’t necessarily see or read. It also says occasionally and quite lightly within the app, that they encourage you to use headphones. However, again, children are unlikely to pay much attention to this.

When you do play without headphones, the city levels still give you lots of points even when you don’t play the chords, because the device can hear the accompaniment playing the correct chords – this is exactly why the developer feels you need to use headphones, and I completely agree! I highly suggest that the app has a warning function if headphones are not recognised or plugged in, so that the city levels cannot be played without headphones, as it just wouldn’t work and would give a false representation of how the student is doing.

Secondly, it is a real shame that this is lacking collaborative or recording features. Any ideal opportunity would be to be able to connect to Google Classroom, where teachers can assign students to complete 2-3 songs in a week, and the app automatically sends through the scores when the student has completed the songs, for example. This is just one example of collaboration that would support education incredibly well. It looks like there are teacher capabilities and options for the entire World of Music, but utilising just an iPhone, this isn’t clear at the moment.

You can download Harmony City: Learn chords on your iOS or Android devices from the app stores. Download the Harmony City: Learn chords app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.