Woodshedr

Woodshedr is an iOS app with great potential. It shows music, chords and rhythm in a familiar staff format, crisp and clear.


App: Woodshedr
Available for: iOS
Price: Free (but in app purchases)
Developer: Highway 1 Design
Website: http://woodshedr.com/

Woodshedr offers unsurpassed play-alongs, featuring real recorded performances which you can mix and mute according to your preferences. Almost like practicing with a great band with the music autoscrolling before your eyes. It even records your session!

There are a few minor glitches; like the portrait-only layout, the rather small font used, no full screen mode. But none of these great or weak point really matters, as Woodshedr is almost unusable anyway. The app itself is free but offers in-app purchases of songs, which is perfectly fine and nowadays becoming a common business model. The problem is that the Woodshedr store has, in total, two different tunes to choose between. Plus the "Woodshedr Blues" which is included for free in the initial download.

As the app has a proprietary file format and doesn't import anything else, this means that Woodshedr can only be used to view three songs. That's it!

But, as initially said, there's a lot of great potential here. Let's just hope the Woodshedr developers succeeds in licensing more songs to record and sell, but also that more file formats will be supported.

Verdict:
Great. But not that great.

(Tested: Woodshedr version 1.3 on iPad)