Fender Tune App Review

Fender Tune App Review Video Transcript

Hey, guys, what's going on? Today, we are going to look at another one of the Fender apps, the Fender Tune app.

You can see I have my iPad here. Depending on how you do it, it works on your phone or the iPad here. So we'll walk through some of the screen recordings here. And there are two versions of this. There's the one that you get totally out of the box, free, you download it from the App Store, no account required. That's what we're going to walk through here.

You unlock some extra features if you sign up with a Fender account and certain other features will be unlocked if you have the suite of Fender apps like Fender Play or the Fender Songs.

Navigating the Fender Tune Home Screen and Shop Tab

We'll start out with some of the other features other than the tuner. You can see I still have my wrist injury here. 

So we'll try out the tuner in a little bit. Right here's the home screen. You have your tuning options here, you can see the Pro Tuner at the bottom. Right of that top section is part of the login. 

There's a video here that links over to one of the Fender Play tuning videos, and then you also have guitar bass, and ukulele tunings. So, a lot there. 

One of the things here that is nice too, we jump over into the Shop feature. If you have a Fender account, you do get a discount if you buy directly through them. This is a nice way of looking at either beginner-category guitars on the right there, or any of the new products that they've released this year. 

At the time of the recording, NAMM is going on where all the guitar companies unveil all their new lineups for the year. So buy a T-shirt, buy any straps or pics you might need. If you want to go deep into the Fender catalog, that's all there.

Fender Songs via the Fender Tune App

Next to that is the songs. Again, this is going to be one of those things where if you have a Fender Play account, you'll be able to get all of them. It's a great way to learn your first couple of songs. They do focus on some of the easier parts of it. Like, for example, before recording this, I looked at the "American Idiot" chords that they have and it focuses on the power chords. 

And I will click on this. So it starts off and it immediately has the Fender Play lesson that you can go through. And this is 11 minutes long. And the nice thing here is, if you look at the bottom part of the video, you can cast this to any of your other AirPlay devices if you run on Apple…not sure about Android. I don't have any Android in the house, so I can't do that. Anything you see with the little lock, again, is part of the account. So if you sign up, you can do that.

This should be pretty familiar in terms of the tab with the chord charts. Things with Green Day are going to be pretty much all power chords.  You get the rhythm there, the tuning, and the tempo. So that's nice. You can see, if you want to go pretty far into the song, you do have to have the Fender Play to get full access to things. But at least this gets you started on some of that. 

Tools & More Sections of Fender Tune App

We go out of rhythm, into the Tools section, this is why I went out of order. You need to have the Fender Tune account in order to look at chords. The chords or the scales or use the metronome, the metronome is actually pretty nice. And the rhythm is kind of nice too because if you prefer to play with the sound of a drummer rather than just that clicking of a metronome, it's there. 

And the chords and the scales are pretty nice, especially when you have a question of, "Okay, how do I play C-sharp minor 7?" If you don't have that memorised or if that's not a chord you use frequently, you can look it up. Similarly, if you want to look up a particular scale and a particular position, this is a nice way of doing it if you don't have the moveable scales that we've talked about already memorized. So that would be something to practice.

Under the More section here, you can see you have your login account, the various settings of the tuner, which is kind of nice. You can have it set for Chromatic, which is really great, but then it does shut off a lot of these other options. The success sound, once you get the guitar into tune, or the bass, or ukulele, you'll hear this a little du-dup. And it's kind of nice to know that you're within the range but if you don't like that, that option is there. So, again, you pick your instrument just so it knows. 

The reference pitch here, this you need the account. This is one the pro option, the pro tuner piece is the account option. This allows you to do anything other than what most people do. So most people use A440 to tune the guitar, and that works for 99% of guitar players. If you have any custom tunings like if you're doing things like Kaki King, Michael Dawes, anything like that, you can plug in your own custom tuning. 

Now, I will say for players like myself, the Fender guitars are limited in the sense that they do not bring anything with seven-string or eight-string guitars. Because any of that extended range is just not there. Towards the bottom in this tune settings list, if you had a baritone or if you're doing down-tuned six strings, there are the options there for that, but you don't have the seven-string version. That's probably one of the only misses, I think, in this app and some of the other tuning apps that I've used is that they don't accommodate the extended-range players. But then, again, Fender knows its audience. If you're gonna be playing extended range, you're probably going to be playing a Jackson or one of the other Fender brands, not necessarily Fender proper. 

So we can jump into the tuner here. You'll have to give it access to your microphone when you have this in order for it to pick up on the tuner. So you can see it's just kind of going on all over the place because I'm talking. So let me set up a guitar here quick. So because I'm one-handed, I won't be playing anything, but we can see I have not tuned this guitar before shooting this video. So we can just pluck the low string and you can see where it goes. 

All right, there you go. We'll do the other strings with the other tuner. 

So the manual tuner here, this is kind of nice if you don't like the mover, the little icon moving, you just want to have a reference pitch. And so here you can press the G that rings out. You can tell going from winter to spring has wreaked some havoc on this tuner, on this guitar. 

Now, if you press this little settings piece, that does bring this back up. I do prefer it if you press this loop button because then you don't have to press the pitches over and over again, like you saw I was doing there. 

So I would recommend you come in and you press that so that it continues to play while you get that tuning right. And you could see from doing the original one, doing the first bit of tuning to this one, the guitar was moving itself around. And like any tuning video we recommend, first you tune it once, then you go back over it again because of how getting the guitar into tune changes the string tension, which then pulls the string sharp or flat. 

So always go through it twice. Using a tuner like this is great just to have the reference pitch to get your ears trained, as well as having more of that in a digital display tuner. So there you go, that's the free version of the Fender Tune App. Totally recommend going into that, especially if you're getting into the Fender Play piece and getting yourself started off the bat.  The suite of apps that Fender has is really tailored to the beginning guitarists so it's a great place to start.

All right, so hope this was helpful. You can find the transcript of any of the videos on BeginningGuitarOnline.com. If you're on YouTube, like, subscribe, share, help us out, that really does help other beginning guitarists find us and join the community. 

Hope you're doing well, and we'll see you in the next video. Take care.