This isn't an Apple commercial, but if you don't own an iPhone you might want to skip this article. There's something coming that I think is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we'll see in the future.
I got turned on to this iPhone app while recording our next Danno CD (okay, now THIS is a plug for our upcoming album, so stay tuned for more info). Chris, our steel guitar player, told me about an app for less than $10 that did the job of a $200 Peterson tuner. In fact, the app was written by the good folks at Peterson, so it will likely work just as well as one of their standalone hardware tuners.
I bought the app, and soon I was tuning my ukulele with a honest-to-goodness
Peterson Strobotuner. Nice! For those in the know, the Peterson Strobotuners are the Porsches of tuners. If you're serious about your music, you've probably run across a Peterson tuner.
So where am I going with this? Well, I believe that the hardware platform for a lot of our musical needs might be already in the palm of our hands. It's the smartphone. And since we're already made the capital investment in the hardware, the software apps should end up costing pennies on the dollar compared to their "Big Brother" incarnations (i.e., a $200 Peterson Strobostomp box versus the $10 iPhone app), so you can see where this might be headed.
I don't know where this will all end up, but maybe someday I'll be playing a virtual ukulele on my cell phone.
