2010 TrueFire Survey Results

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According to our 2010 Survey, odds are you are a 50 year-old intermediately-skilled male guitarist who has been playing mostly blues and rock guitar for 10 or more years, usually at home alone for about 3 – 5 hours per week. Your favorite color is blue, your first pet’s name was Buddy, and you drive a black Ford F-150.

Ok, we made that last part up, but all jokes aside we really learned a ton about the TrueFire community via our survey, and we wanted to A) thank you again for taking the time out to provide us with information that we believe will help us in our never ending quest to improve the TrueFire experience and B) share some of the results with you so that you too could learn a little something about your fellow TrueFiremen (and women). Without further ado, here are a few stats and colorful graphs that reflect selected results from our survey. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

How You Feel About Us

97% rated the quality of our artists & educators as “Very Good” or “Excellent”

95% rated the quality of our educational content as “Very Good” or “Excellent”

90% rated the quality of our learning tools as “Very Good” or “Excellent”

About You







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TrueFire Toons – “Innovative Imitation”

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7 Cool iPhone Apps for Guitarists

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Guitar Lessons iPhone AppAs some of you may already know, we have developed a killer iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch app for guitarists, including video guitar lessons, tab, and notation — all accessible on the go. We call it TrueFire’s Guitar Lab and it’s totally free. Our goal is to give guitarists access to the best video guitar lessons anywhere, anytime.

The app is free and available for download right now. Our iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad app is a great way to access the ‘Fire around the world, and we’re hoping you’ll dig it!

You should also check out these 7 cool iPhone apps for guitar (they all work on the iTouch, too).

guitar iphone app cleartuneCleartune This $3.99 app is incredibly useful. It’s a visually appealing chromatic instrument tuner and pitch pipe that uses the built-in iPhone mic or external mic on an iTouch 2G (as most relevant apps do). You can use the large “note wheel” display to find your notes, and there’s a fine-tuning display with 25-cent range. It’s precise to +/- 100 semitones and there are even selectable temperaments and notations. You can also select tone waveforms and choose automatic or manual note selection.

guitar iphone app tempoTempo Frozen Ape’s $0.99 app is a metronome with set list and tuner. Another cool looking app, it features tap tempo functionality with 17 different time signatures and 6 rhythm patterns for simple meters and 3 for compound ones. You can use a pulsating LED to flash on the first beat and it can be viewed in Landscape or Portrait. The tempos range from 20 bpm to 250 bpm, and there’s a pitch pipe with 12 chromatic pitches. For sounds, you’ve got 4 sets to choose from including Digital, Analog, Shaker and Rock Kit.

guitar iphone app gtkGuitarToolkit At $9.99, it’s a little pricey (well, for apps) but it does bring it; Aside of the excellent chromatic tuner, you’ve got a library of 500,000 chords (are there that many?), a metronome with flash functionality, a chord finder where you just touch the notes on the virtual fretboard, and scales in standard or alternate tunings. It supports 6- and 12-string guitars as well as 4-, 5- and 6-string bass, mandolin, banjo and even ukulele (with full chord library) — all with standard and alternative tunings.

guitar iphone app fourtrackFourTrack Sonoma Wireworks $9.99 app is a multitrack recorder for iPhone 2.0/ iPod touch 2nd Gen 3.0 that uses the headset/microphone to record 16 bit/44.1 kHz quality audio. You can mix your creations to two new tracks so the count can go above 16 channels. It’s got calibrated meters, faders, pan controls and a built-in compressor-limiter. You can record along with real drum loops, and recordings can be copied via WiFi to any computer with a browser.

guitar iphone app steelguitarSteel Guitar   This free app (for now) from Yonac Software is just a blast to play. You can choose from Lap Steel, Eight-String Console or either traditional Nashville or Texas setups. Moving the iPhone bends notes, and you can use a “pro” mode to manually play a slide bar. It actually sounds pretty cool and you’ll get lost for hours just creating sounds. Same goes for several other Yonac apps like Mandolin and Theremin-ator.

guitar iphone app groovemakerGrooveMaker This free app from IKMultimedia has over 120 loops (113MB of samples) and lets you create electronic dance and hip hop tracks using a built-in sequencer. Even if that’s not your style, it’s useful to practice to the grooves, and you can tap tempos from 78 to 125 bpm. Final mixes can be Wi-Fi’ed as WAV files to your Mac or PC.

guitar iphone app voicememosVoice Memo Okay, so this is not really an app, but it’s built into the iPhone and it’s just plain old useful. You can use the built-in mic to capture your musical ideas on the fly, and then label them for recall later. The mic in the iPhone is actually not too bad. Voice Memo is great for recording those off-the-cuff ideas that might otherwise be lost forever.

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TrueFire Toons – “Standing Out”

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“Mississippi Blues” – Tim Sparks

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Tim Sparks has been redefining the acoustic guitar repertoire since he won the US National Fingerstyle Championship in 1993 with a ground-breaking arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Since then, Sparks has continued to surprise, challenge, and thrill audiences with his diverse repertoire and stunning technique. Equally at home within the Country Blues, Ragtime, Jazz or World Music genres, Sparks’ extraordinary ability to adapt virtually any music to the solo guitar has earned him an international reputation as one of the most innovative guitarists working today.

Virtuoso acoustic wizard and fingerstyle master, Sparks presents Fingerstyle Roots, Rags & Blues, an insightful exploration of Early Americana Roots music and intensive fingerstyle study program for intermediate and advanced students. Fingerstyle Roots, Rags & Blues covers Delta Blues, Country Gospel, New Orleans, Ragtime, Early Jazz and the most amazing version of “The Mississippi Blues” that we’ve ever seen performed or heard here at TrueFire:

Mississippi Blues – Introduction

Mississippi Blues – Breakdowns 1 – 7

Mississippi Blues – Breakdowns 8 – 14

Mississippi Blues – Breakdowns 15 – 23

Mississippi Blues – Breakdowns 24 – 32

Mississippi Blues – Breakdowns 33 – 40

The full Fingerstyle Roots, Rags, & Blues guitar course is available for purchase on TrueFire.

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