GuitAfrica

"…I love it!…that’s the funkiest stuff ever!” - John Scofield

"GuitAfrica is a wonderful app: it enables you to discover the richness and beauty of Pan-African music. African guitar playing is a real science and GuitAfrica gives you its secrets in a fun way!" - Angélique Kidjo

A collaborative project with world renowned guitarist Lionel Loueke from Benin, West Africa - GuitAfrica offers an informative and enjoyable way to learn African style guitar.

We believe that learning music should not be tedious, nor a chore - it should be fun, inspiring and fulfilling. So we invited Lionel Loueke to compose and perform 22 beautiful songs especially for GuitAfrica. They represent and are inspired by the traditional sounds of African ethnic groups spanning the entire continent.

Each song comes with a full score and individual parts for guitars, bass and drums.
The guitar and bass parts come with both, standard music notation and tablatures so that you can learn Lionel’s exact fingerings.

Each song also comes with a detailed information sheet describing the traditional music background, instruments and ethnic group that inspired it.

We believe in producing the best possible quality products, so we went into the studio with a great band and a great audio engineer to capture Lionel’s music and his playing.

Learning any of the songs is easy. Here is an example of how you could use GuitAfrica:

Start by solo-ing a part so that you can focus on it, and maybe leave the metronome and/or bass tracks turned on to keep you in time. You can even select a few measures to be looped and if that’s not enough you can slow down the tempo. Piece by piece in this manner, you can learn the whole part.

The next step is to mute the part you just learned, un-mute all the other instruments and play along just as if you were one of the members of the band.

If you want to further challenge yourself, you can also change the pitch of the song - perfect for learning a specific phrase in all keys.

It’s important to match not only the notes but also the feel of Lionel’s playing, therefore, close listening and repetition are key here.

African music is deeply rooted in rhythm so the drums and percussion parts will help you better understand the music.

GuitAfrica is perfect not only for guitarists but for all musicians wanting to learn and understand African music.

The iPad is perfect to read the music parts with its large screen but the iPhone can be used as well since you can zoom into each music staff and all the parts can be printed.

We had a hard time labeling or defining GuitAfrica as it’s a great learning tool, but we also constantly find ourselves listening to the music as if it was a recording. Perhaps it’s somewhere at the nexus of art and learning.

Tip: GuitAfrica is compatible with Audiobus (www.audiob.us) so you can record yourself playing with Lionel and his band with Garageband or other ‘guitar amp’ apps.

See a video demo of GuitAfrica on our website www.GuitAfrica.com