tonebase

This app includes many fantastic features that I know would be helpful to any musician who uses them. However, this app is expensive. Other than the quiz, you can’t do anything in the app without paying for a subscription. The subscription options are: $49.99/month $299.99/year $699.00/lifetime There isn’t a seven day free trial period that many subscription services have. The reason I’m rating this at four stars is because the app offers many useful resources for musicians at all levels. I’m taking away one star because it’s expensive. I do acknowledge that the price is fair for what you get out of the app, it’s just out of my price range.

I am a professional cellist and have studied with many of the great teachers alive today…including many of the teachers available through this course! I have to say that as someone usually highly skeptical about these kinds of platforms, I am completely impressed. The cost of the course is what you would pay for one lesson with many of the artists available here. The amount of material covered is extensive, and I genuinely see this app as rivaling the traditional thinking about mastering an instrument. I think any instrumentalist should take advantage of this resource regardless your level. As I said, I perform for a profession, and I am still learning lots and getting many new ideas through this app. Classical music has always had ‘gate keepers’, and prohibitive costs—this is a large step to removing those barriers. 10/10!

All does need a few updates to run seamlessly. However, it is an excellent resource to learn from. It would be nice to integrate a type of library that’s built into the app to save the annotated music and notes. Overall, I am very happy with tonebase and look forward to renewing my membership each year!

The most recent release now has the same functionality as the website. Previously, you could only watch videos, but now you can access the community forums through the app. I have not encountered any problems with the latest update. I am using the app on my iPad Pro.

I thought other reviews were exaggerating the quality of the app. It’s…shocking. I consistently lose video when going from Portrait to Landscape on the iPhone. I have to quit the app to see anything….only for it to blank out again. The iPad app is an iPhone compatibility app. It’s terrible. Both of these issues are fairly foundational and wouldn’t take a competent developer to resolve. So begs the question…how is this possible? The content pages seem okay, perhaps some quick and dirty framework is used like ReactNative, and the developer doesn’t understand the foundational components. Anyway, the app is definitely souring my ability to enjoy the amazing lessons, and content. It’s truly a weird dichotomy to witness such polished talent coming through an unpolished app. I really want to support this app and all of the amazing artists involved. Please fix!

I enjoy in both the portrait and landscape full screen mode on my iPad. However, videos with the score showing below on the website seem to be kissing the score on the app version. I like that feature in the web based versions of lessons on peaces

It seems this is a brand new app written in 2023 which isn’t adaptive to both iPad and iPhone. Why not design for that to begin with? iPad is a great format for putting on a music stand at a comfortable distance. I can’t imagine why the dev would want to make 2 apps for this. This developer has fantastic music instruction but extremely questionable engineering (website included). It’s a shame.