Strum Machine - Backing Tracks

I am a long time guitar player of various genres. Primarily these days I am in to Bluegrass flatpicking both Guitar and Mandolin. Without question, strum machine has done more to advance my music, not only in terms of skills but also in enjoying my practice sessions than any other tool. These days I don’t ever practice without first turning on Strum Machine and utilizing it’s many tools. Also, Luke and his team are constantly upgrading and improving the tool. Well worth the annual minimal fee!

I was struggling trying to get Band in a Box to perform the simple task of giving me backing tracks. A friend told me Band in a Box is great and on that (bad) advice I spent $100 on it. It's so convoluted and tedious to set up. And then all of their Bluegrass backing tracks sound like just noise. I couldn't figure out how to get just a boom chuck strum with mandolin chops. And I couldn't get it to sound right in split time. I'm sure with a lot of work and study, it is possible to get it sounding great but I don't have time to master a programming language just to get some backing tracks. Anyway... I heard about Strum Machine from Marcel and it seemed like an option, but I had some questions: -Can I use it offline? -Can I put in my own songs? -Does it provide the solid rhythm I need? -Is it easy to use? -Can I use it on my ipad? And is the app easy to open and activate each time? The answer to all of these is "yes". Strum Machine has been nothing but a joy to work with. It's so simple to set up and gives me exactly what I need for backing tracks. I can't say enough good things about it.

This app is absolutely FANTASTIC! Strum Machine’s advertised purpose is as a practice tool, doing backing tracks that are much more interesting than a metronome. Perfect! But wait, there’s more. Do you like using Nashville Numbers style charts for gigs? Strum Machine is perfect for that too. It has a very easy and intuitive editor to set up cleanly formatted NNS style charts. You can easily add lyrics into the notes field. And then easily build set lists. The whole shebang displays nicely on your iPhone, so you can clip your iPhone to your mic stand. It’s wonderful. It just works!

I am a long time guitar player of various genres. Primarily these days I am in to Bluegrass flatpicking both Guitar and Mandolin. Without question, strum machine has done more to advance my music, not only in terms of skills but also in enjoying my practice sessions than any other tool. These days I don’t ever practice without first turning on Strum Machine and utilizing it’s many tools. Also, Luke and his team are constantly upgrading and improving the tool. Well worth the annual minimal fee!

This app is exactly what I needed, both for functionality AND for ease of use. It is highly intuitive, fast and easy to customize my own backing tracks, simple to sort them, and importantly, to find them again. It’s helping me so much with my practicing! The developer is also highly supportive and hard at work making it even better.

As an ear musician on several instruments, this app has been very helpful with my timing. Highly recommended. Use a Bluetooth speaker to increase the volume.

I started playing bluegrass around the start of COVID. As a result, I did not have an opportunity to play with anyone else. I thought that I was doing pretty well until I got Strum Machine. I now realize that I had a lot to correct. I was, well, awful. After using Strum Machine for about an hour on Whiskey Before Breakfast, my playing got tolerable. That was a BIG improvement. I expect to use it almost every day from now on. I can't imagine a better tool for learning to play. I even found it easy to create a new version of Whiskey Before Breakfast that uses an Em that I use. I'll probably attempt to create a whole song one of these days. Being able to slow the music down is an unbelievable advantage. Allowing it to automatically speed up is icing on the cake. I absolutely hate using a metronome, but this is a type of metronome that is actually fun to use. I expect this to increase my bluegrass learning exponentially. There are no downsides as far as I can see.

I downloaded this last week after my wife showed it to me. I’m having so much fun with it. I play banjo. I’ve saved a lot of songs they have on the sight, and I’ve added a bunch more they didn’t have. It’s very easy to add your own songs. It’s like having a jam available to you 24/7. The longest I’ve played with it at one sitting was 3.5 hrs. I may break that tomorrow during our snowstorm

The customizable features of strum machine are amazing! For musicians at ever level, this app was clearly designed by a musician to help other musicians develop in all the essential ways. The preloaded songs are awesome! But, so is the ability to change them, change keys, add my own songs, and change speeds. Every musician knows there are those tricky phrases and this app let's you conveniently highlight those and practice them over and over, at whatever speed you need to get them into muscle memory. I also love the auto- speed up feature with settable top speed to practice playing faster at a settable bpm rate (I usually increase by 2 bpm) which is a fantastic way to develop skill! I also like being able to set which backup instruments are playing. I am learning mandolin, so when practicing chop chords, I turn off the mandolin chop in strum machine so that I fill that roll with the bass and guitar. I use the preloaded songs to practice improvising using major, pentatonic, minor scales and arpeggios. I can't say enough about how thoughtful this app is and how helpful it is to any developing musician. Well done and thank you!!!

Fantastic app for honing timing and accuracy, and so configurable yet simple to use which to me is the biggest factor for my rating. I have enjoyed immediate day 1 results from using it and see this bring my go-to practice aid for the foreseeable future.