Mini meme

● Yousician

There have long been rumours of a new Guitar Hero game, but rocking out with a plastic axe doesn’t cut it. Yousician lets you discover and unleash your inner Hendrix with a real guitar. Using its game-like interface, you play along to notes and chords that scroll across the screen, amassing a high score and worldwide superstardom when you perform well. OK, maybe only the first one of those. £free (IAP) / Android, iOS

● MuseScore

More Mozart than Megadeth? MuseScore has loads of songs transcribed as sheet music by its community. Put your phone in landscape and you get a handy scrolling view, with optional slowdown for when your fingers can’t keep up. Pay and you unlock a live keyboard, PDF export, offline playback, and classes that range from drum programming to jazz saxophone. Nice. £free (IAP) / Android, iOS

Mini meme

PL AY THAT CLU N K Y M USIC

Keen to kickstart your musical life but barely able to smack a biscuit tin with a stick? Learn to play and compose with this selection of helpful apps…

● Chordbot

Blindly smashing out chord progressions live is the way most musicians do it. The snag: it’s easy to hit upon a perfect sequence… and immediately forget it. Chordbot gives you a space for experimentation without risk. You select a key and insert chords, which can be dragged around as your ‘song’ loops. The free Chordbot Lite gives you a taste, but won’t let you save your compositions. £3.29 / Android ● £4.49 / iOS

● Tonaly

This app is based around the circle of fifths, which outlines relationships between tones of the chromatic scale. In other words, it helps you understand which chords work great together. It’s a cinch to adjust the root, structure songs, loop compositions and export work to use elsewhere. And if you want to brush up further on music theory, there are built-in scales and chord libraries. £7.99 / iOS

● Capo

Yousician will teach you to play and lead you through popular songs, but that’s no good if your favourites are unavailable. With Capo, you can feed in any DRM-free track and it’ll pull out the chords. Impressively, it mostly gets them right; and when it doesn’t, you can easily enough make edits, thereby mastering the most indie of indie hits before taking a crack at writing your own. £free (IAP) / iOS

● Functional Ear Trainer

A better bet than Totally Broken Ear Trainer (which we might have just made up), this app plays notes and tasks you with recognising what each one is. It starts you off with just four notes in C major, and you can then move on at your own pace to more complex levels. With no price tag and no ads, this one’s a must to help with composing, songwriting and jamming. £free (IAP) / Android, iOS