Portable Musician's Friend

Musicians know the joys and challenges of living on the road from show to show. Unless they are successful enough to afford an entourage of roadies and semi-trucks to cart their equipment to their next destination, musicians prefer to travel as light as possible. This not only reduces their load but also makes set up and tear down much easier.

With these demanding requirements, the compact portability and computing power present in today's Windows Mobile devices can make personal and business communication easier between band mates, business partners, friends, family, and fans. But besides the obvious use of voice, e-mail, and Web browsing transactions, what other helpful uses can the Windows Mobile portable powerhouse provide to performing artists?

Tuning your instrument

Anyone in a working band knows that the first task after setting up is tuning up. While some of the more expensive guitars have built-in tuners to facilitate this process, they are often inaccurate and sometimes inflexible. Having a mobile tuner that can conform to the needs of multiple pitch ranges and personal preferences is ideal. Fortunately for the Windows Mobile musician, several graphical tuning applications exist that literally blow away the more expensive competition. These software-based tuners leverage the power of the CPU, display resolution, input microphone, and output speaker to deliver a substantially more effective and faster tuning experience. And because it's mobile, it can be passed between band members to tweak their own instruments.

Since instrument tuning applications are one of the most obvious solutions for musicians, they are also the most plentiful. Freeware tone generators, those that play a single note or major/minor chord combinations, are plentiful. However, because these applications lack an internal feedback mechanism, they fail to "close the loop," leaving it up to an individual's ear and their own interpretation of tonal accuracy. It's considerably more difficult to program a tuner that captures, interprets, and meaningfully displays tonal measurements. Fortunately, several solutions are available, with single to multi-instrument capabilities.

4Pockets (http://4pockets.com) is one of the most prolific vendors in the mobile audio application space. They offer several low to high-end products that make instrument tuning a breeze. Their Chromatic Guitar Tuner ($19.95) is specifically designed for guitarists seeking an easy lock on standard tunings. It is a no frills, easy-to-use application that uses a VU meter metaphor to visually assist the player. AutoTuner ($29.95) expands upon the basic capabilities of Guitar Tuner, adding audio range support beyond the 5 fixed tuning styles and 6 transposition steps. As such, any tonal instrument can be tuned using AutoTuner.

The 4Pockets Chromatic Guitar Tuner is minimal but adequate for the job.

AutoTuner is an all-purpose instrument tuner.

On the high end of things, 4Pockets also offers the amazing PocketRTA Pro ($44.95)—a mobile sound engineer's dream application. This program raises the bar for tuning applications by displaying a real-time spectrograph of incoming audio, allowing the user to visualize this data in six different display modes: linear, logarithmic narrow band, octave (including 1/3rd and 1/6th), sample, SPL, and Spectrogram displays with ANSI A and C weighting curves. This means that the audio waveforms generated in a sound can be studied from many different angles to understand and master it.

PocketRTA Professional is designed for the mobile sound engineer.