If you’ve got an iPhone, you may be familiar with Agile Partners who previously gave us the, very handy, Guitar Toolkit.  It’s also worth knowing, however, that Agile also have an iPhone tablature application that does some very clever things.

TabToolkit (iTunes Store link), which works on the iPhone and iPod Touch allows you to view tabs in Power Tab and Guitar Pro formats as well as text and PDF tab files.  If you’re using Power Tab or Guitar Pro, TabToolkit will display the information in both tab and standard musical notation with a nice fretboard display at the bottom of the screen (you can see in the picture).

The chords and notes can be seen on the fretboard as the song plays.  Also, and this is a nice touch, there’s a synthesis engine built in that will ‘play’ the notes as it goes so you can get an idea of what your song is supposed to sound like.  It’s also worth noting that the fretboard display can be switched to show a keyboard display with real-time finger placements.  Very nice.

You can slow down playback if you’re learning a tricky lick and the app can easily reverse the relevant displays if you’re a southpaw.

With PDF and text files, you don’t get all of the features listed but if you’ve got access to Power Tab or Guitar Pro files, I suspect you won’t regret downloading TabToolkit.  It’s in the App Store for $9.99 or the relevant local equivalent.

Agile Partners site has more info and a demonstration video.