Jazz Trumpet Level 1

Too many apps nowadays look great, with a host of unnecessary features, full social media options, and yet the actual content leaves a lot to be lacking. This app is the exact opposite of that. There are no silly distractions, as none are really needed because the quality of the concept and execution are brilliant.

As you may have guessed from the title, this is an app for aspiring trumpeters. When you load up the home screen you are presented with a selection of 3 songs. When you click on the songs you can see the sheet music and all you have to do is press play to get started. By far the most impressive thing about this app is the quality of the recordings. All the songs have been recorded live and the playing and sound quality is top notch.

The way it works is, the song plays with a beat counter that scrolls along the sheet music as the relevant portion of the song is being played. Then the user has the choice of playing along with the all the instruments, or taking out the Trumpet to play along with just the backing track. You can also remove the other instruments as well as the bar counter.

It’s this flexibility that really makes this a powerful tool. You also have the option to slow the song down in 10 bpm (beats per minute) increments. You can make the songs up to 40 bpm’s slower and it doesn’t have too much of an effect on the sound quality. Lastly, you can loop any section of the song, so if there’s one particular bit that you’re stuck on, you can slow it down and keep it on a loop until you get it right.

And that’s it – Simple, but highly effective. This setup is clearly the future of musical training. The next stages for the app are just to build on the amount of songs. For what it is, this app is perfect, but we’d love to see at some point, the addition of some theory lessons and possibly some tutorial videos, so a novice could learn to play using this app alone.

Overall we’re thoroughly impressed and would highly recommend the app for use in the classroom or at home.

You can download Jazz Trumpet Level 1 on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.