App-based guitar or piano learning?

I recommend Justin Guitar, but it's web based. He might have released an app too.

In recent years, I have used the following for guitar and bass:

Rocksmith & Rocksmith 2014: The original Rocksmith and Rocksmith 2014 (including the remastered version from 2016) are my favourites. They have pretty good song catalogues and make practice fun with all sorts of minigames -- think arcade games that you play with your guitar or bass hooked into your computer. There are a couple of important things you need to know though: The original game is no longer available and Rocksmith 2014 will also be delisted this month, so now is pretty much the last chance to get it. While you can play through a microphone, my experience has been better with the official cable, or playing through an audio interface. And if you do buy Rocksmith 2014 before they stop selling it, I would highly recommend also purchasing the Cherub Rock DLC, as that will allow to you to easily use the community created tracks that you can find from CustomsForge, giving you an almost endless supply of songs to learn.

Rocksmith+: About a year ago, Ubisoft released a new version of Rocksmith. It wasn't very well received by the community and although I still have my subscription, I haven't touched it for over half a year. The song catalogue is huge but shallow, as it lacks the kind of songs that most people wanting to play guitar would like to play. It is also subscription based, rather than a one-time purchase. On the plus side, the user interface is an upgrade over the earlier Rocksmiths, and for an eternal beginner like myself, the teaching parts are quite a bit better done and structured than in the earlier games. And I think it now also supports mobile devices, although it doesn't support MacOS like Rocksmith 2014 did.

Yousician: This is quite similar to Rocksmith, except in addition to guitar and bass, it can also teach you ukulele, keyboards and singing. It can detect your playing or singing from your mobile phone's microphone, and in my experience it does it pretty decently. But while I would like to love it, I just somehow don't -- its methods feel less fun than Rocksmith's, the song selection is poor, and the user interface confuses me for some reason.

Justin Guitar: A pretty nice and largely free online course that many consider the best way to learn guitar. I think it has a companion app but no fancy game modes like Rocksmith or Yousician -- you largely just watch videos of the instructor and then practise, practise, practise. The course is much better structured and thought out than those found in Rocksmith or Yousician. My feeling is that Rocksmith and Yousician want you to learn to play songs, while Justin wants you to learn to play the guitar.

The bottom line of course is: an app won't make you a musician. I've started all of these, and I've stuck with none of them. Every half a year or so, I start learning guitar again. Only to put it aside a couple of months later when something else catches my attention.

I've been a musician for -- well, let's just say many years.

(Call me old school, but) There is no substitute for what a human (i.e. teacher) can tell you, especially one with formal training, and whom you see regularly (i.e. regular lessons). Yes that does cost money, but that's because it provides good value.

In the absence of a teacher, just asking the occasional question of a friend who is an experienced musician will help, especially if they can watch and listen to you play.

Even watching YouTubes of good teachers would be better than learning from an app, IMO. ("Change my mind"?)

I think, at best, an app might be able to give you some of the very rudimentary basics of playing an instrument, but your skill set will have holes in it, and you wouldn't have learned good technique. Then, when you try to advance to intermediate levels, your technique would hinder you, and you'd have to unlearn some things, actually causing you to progress slower than if you were shown and guided into good technique right from the start. (I can speak from experience about the hindering and unlearning.)

So, I recommend finding humans to learn from. It doesn't have to cost any money at first.

I liked synthesia enough to buy it. Went from zero piano to a bunch of beginner songs pretty quickly. For me, it really helped with timing and syncopation, because it marks where in the bar you hit the notes you can visually see where you're off.

I've always either had lessons or been self taught by ear so I don't have any proper recommendations for apps except for one: Sight Reading Factory for practising (you guessed it) sight reading. If you don't read music, I would really recommend investing some time in learning to, as it can unlock a lot of technique and theory that are essential to playing blues and jazz especially. Sight reading is one of the most useful tools in the "learning to read" arsenal, and this app is really good because it just procedurally generates short pieces of music based on specific criteria you set. It's $35 for the year, so not crazy expensive either.

I also recommed justin guitar. He has a lot of sheet music and tutorials on a huge variety of songs, including blues. If you have a foundation but just want more blues stuff, I'd try just watching youtube videos of blues guitarists. There are some tutorials there too, but they are scattershot.

For Piano, I've used PianoMarvel and I've really liked it. I started with no piano background, but I played Trumpet through highschool so I already knew how to read sheet music and figure out rythms. It has a series of method lessons that get gradually harder and introduce new concepts as you go. In practice mode, it shows you exactly what notes you are playing on the staff as you play them and the line doesn't progress to the next note until you play the correct one. Once you have a better sense for the piece, you can play it in real time for a score on the lesson.

Outside of the lessons, they also have a giant library of various songs that each have a level associated with them so you can tell whether it is within your skill level. I haven't really looked into it much, but it seems like there's a lot of stuff there. Also while looking through it, it seems like there is a way to upload your own music to use within the system as well.

I personally chose this over synthesia since I cared about learning piano with sheet music as opposed to the note drop style synthesia uses.

The only downside is that is is relatively expensive, $15 a month, or $130 ($10.89/mo) for a yearly subscription. They do have a free tier, but I think it only includes the first tier out of six lessons (and is very easy if you have any music background), but should give you a good sense of what the program itself is like.