Top 16 'Passion-Project-Reboot' Music Apps to learn with for adults rediscovering a long-lost instrument at home. - Goh Ling Yong
It’s a familiar story. Tucked away in a closet, leaning against a wall in the spare room, or sitting silently in the corner of your living room is a ghost of passions past: a guitar with one broken string, a keyboard gathering dust, a violin case that hasn’t been opened in a decade. You loved it once. Life, as it often does, just got in the way. But recently, a quiet little thought has been getting louder: “What if I tried again?”
Welcome to your ‘Passion-Project-Reboot.’ This isn’t about the pressure of formal lessons or the dream of playing Carnegie Hall. It's about reconnecting with a part of yourself, for yourself. It’s about the pure, simple joy of making music again. The beautiful thing about returning to an instrument as an adult is that you bring a new level of patience, appreciation, and intention to the process.
The even better news? You’re not alone on this journey. Your smartphone or tablet can be the most patient, versatile, and inspiring music teacher you’ve ever had. We’ve curated a list of the top 16 music apps specifically designed to help adults like you dust off the case, tune up, and fall back in love with your long-lost instrument.
1. Yousician
Yousician is the friendly giant of music learning apps. It offers guided, gamified lessons for guitar, piano, bass, ukulele, and even singing. Think of it as a video game where your instrument is the controller.
The app listens to you play through your device’s microphone and gives you real-time feedback on your timing and accuracy. This immediate response is incredibly motivating and helps you correct mistakes before they become ingrained habits. The curriculum is structured like a clear-cut path, taking you from the absolute basics to more advanced techniques, with thousands of songs and exercises along the way.
Tip: Use the “Practice Mode” feature religiously. It allows you to slow down any song or exercise to a manageable tempo. Mastering a tricky passage at half-speed is far more effective than struggling through it at full speed ten times.
2. Simply Piano
If your dormant instrument is the piano or keyboard, Simply Piano is a phenomenal starting point. Its interface is clean, beautiful, and incredibly intuitive. It’s designed to get you playing recognizable songs almost immediately, which is a huge confidence booster.
The app breaks down everything from reading sheet music to playing with both hands into small, digestible chunks. It has a massive song library that spans classical, pop, and rock, ensuring you’ll find tunes you actually want to play. It can listen via microphone or connect directly to a digital piano via MIDI for flawless note recognition.
Tip: Place your tablet or phone on the piano's music stand at eye level. This helps you maintain good posture and mimics the natural experience of reading sheet music.
3. Simply Guitar
From the same creators as Simply Piano, Simply Guitar applies the same user-friendly, step-by-step philosophy to the six-string. It’s perfect for the adult learner who might be intimidated by the sheer volume of unstructured guitar tutorials on the internet.
The app guides you from holding the pick and fretting your first note to strumming chords and playing full songs. The video tutorials are clear and concise, and the real-time feedback helps you nail your chord changes and strumming patterns. It’s a structured, encouraging environment to rebuild your calluses and your confidence.
Tip: At the beginning of each practice session, use the app’s built-in tuner. A well-tuned guitar is infinitely more pleasant to play and is crucial for training your ear correctly.
4. Flowkey
Flowkey is a sophisticated and elegant piano learning app that excels at teaching you to play the songs you love. Its core feature is a split-screen video that shows a real pianist’s hands playing the notes, which are simultaneously highlighted on a virtual keyboard and in the sheet music.
This multi-sensory approach is fantastic for visual learners. Flowkey also features a "Wait Mode," where the app will pause and wait for you to play the correct note before moving on—a truly patient teacher. It has a vast library of songs across all genres and difficulty levels, making it a tool that can grow with you.
Tip: Start by learning just the right hand of a song you love. Once that feels comfortable, tackle the left hand. Then, use Flowkey’s slow-down feature to painstakingly put them together. The payoff is worth the patience.
5. Fender Play
If your passion project involves a guitar, bass, or ukulele, who better to learn from than one of the most iconic names in the business? Fender Play offers a high-production-value, video-based curriculum that feels less like an app and more like a series of private lessons with professional instructors.
Instead of a gamified interface, Fender Play is built around a "song-first" approach. The curriculum is structured into short, easy-to-follow video lessons that teach you a technique and then immediately show you how to apply it in a popular song. This makes the learning process feel practical and instantly rewarding.
Tip: Explore the different "paths" Fender Play offers, such as Rock, Blues, or Folk. Focusing on a genre you genuinely love will keep you motivated to pick up your instrument every day.
6. Ultimate Guitar: Chords & Tabs
For anyone picking up a guitar or ukulele again, Ultimate Guitar (UG) is an absolutely essential resource. It is the world's largest catalog of chords, lyrics, and guitar tablature (tabs). If you’ve heard a song, chances are the chords are on UG.
The modern app goes far beyond simple text files. The "Pro" and "Official" tabs are interactive, offering synchronized playback, looping, and tempo control. This turns a static chord chart into a powerful practice tool, allowing you to play along with a backing track and learn songs with unprecedented accuracy.
Tip: Use the "Simplify" feature on complex chords to get a playable version of a song quickly. You can always go back and learn the more intricate voicings later. The goal is to start playing and having fun.
7. Moises
This app is pure magic and a game-changer for practicing. Moises uses AI to separate any song into its individual tracks—vocals, drums, bass, guitar, and piano. Want to play guitar along with The Beatles but can't hear the part clearly? Upload the track to Moises, mute the original guitar, and now you have the world's greatest rhythm section as your personal backing band.
For adults rediscovering an instrument, this is invaluable. It allows you to truly understand how your part fits into the mix. You can slow down the tempo without changing the pitch, change the key of the song to suit your vocal range, and generate a click track. It transforms passive listening into active, engaged practice.
Tip: Use Moises to create a "minus-one" track of a song you're learning. Isolate and listen to just your instrument's part to understand the nuances, then mute it and play along with the rest of the band.
8. iReal Pro
If you're interested in jazz, blues, or pop, and want to understand the theory behind the music, iReal Pro is your new best friend. It’s not a teaching app, but rather a practice tool that displays chord charts and plays high-quality, realistic-sounding backing tracks.
Think of it as a book of thousands of songs, but one that comes with a versatile, endlessly patient trio to rehearse with. You can change the style, tempo, and key of any song. This is perfect for practicing improvisation, understanding chord progressions, and getting your "feel" and timing rock-solid.
Tip: Start with a simple 12-bar blues progression. Set a slow tempo and just try to play the root note of each chord as it changes. This is a foundational exercise for developing your timing and ear.
9. Perfect Ear
Playing an instrument is as much about your ears as it is about your fingers. Perfect Ear is a comprehensive ear training and music theory app that turns what can be a dry subject into a series of engaging exercises and games.
The app includes customizable exercises for interval recognition, chord identification, rhythm dictation, and sight-singing. Spending just 10-15 minutes a day with Perfect Ear will dramatically improve your ability to learn songs by ear, understand what you're playing, and even start improvising.
Tip: Don’t try to do everything at once. Focus on one area for a week, like identifying major vs. minor chords, until it feels second nature.
10. Tenuto
Developed by the brilliant minds behind musictheory.net, Tenuto is a clean, no-nonsense collection of exercises for your phone or tablet. It focuses on the nuts and bolts of music theory and ear training with a beautiful, minimalist interface.
Tenuto is fantastic for drills. It offers exercises for note identification on the staff, key signature recognition, and interval/chord building and identification on a virtual keyboard or fretboard. It’s like flashcards for music theory, but infinitely more powerful and customizable.
Tip: Use the fretboard identification exercise. Being able to instantly name any note on your guitar or bass neck is a superpower that will unlock your playing.
11. Soundbrenner
A metronome is a musician’s most fundamental tool, but the boring "click-clack" can be uninspiring. Soundbrenner reinvents the metronome, making it a powerful and fun rhythm training tool.
Beyond simple clicks, you can customize time signatures, choose different sounds, and create complex rhythmic patterns. The app also features rhythm exercises and the ability to tap a tempo. It’s an incredibly well-designed app that makes practicing your timing feel deliberate and productive.
Tip: Set the metronome to a slow tempo (like 60 bpm) and try to play a simple scale. The challenge is to make each note land exactly on the click. It’s harder than it sounds and is an incredible exercise for developing a solid internal clock.
12. GuitarTuna
Don't let the name fool you. While GuitarTuna is arguably the most popular and reliable tuning app on the market, it does much more. It supports tuning for a massive range of instruments, including guitar, bass, ukulele, violin, and cello.
The app also comes bundled with a basic metronome, a chord library, and fun chord-changing games. These mini-games are a fantastic way to warm up and drill your muscle memory for switching between common chords, which is often the biggest hurdle for returning guitar players.
Tip: After tuning with the app, try to tune your low E string to a reference pitch, and then tune the rest of the strings to each other by ear (the 5th fret method). Use the app to check your accuracy afterward. This is a great way to train your ear.
13. MuseScore
Rediscovering your instrument often means wanting to play new music. MuseScore is a phenomenal resource that offers free access to one of the largest digital sheet music collections on the planet, created by its massive community of users.
You can find everything from Bach fugues to the latest pop hits and film scores. The app allows you to view, listen to, and interact with the sheet music. You can change the tempo of the playback, transpose the score to a different key, and isolate individual parts, making it an excellent tool for study and practice.
Tip: Find a simple version of a song you already know and love. Seeing the notes on the page while listening to the playback can be a powerful way to reconnect your theoretical knowledge with the practical act of playing.
14. forScore
For the Apple-ecosystem user, particularly those with an iPad, forScore is the undisputed king of digital sheet music readers. It's a professional-grade app that lets you import, organize, and annotate your entire sheet music library.
You can get rid of binders and folders and have every piece of music you own at your fingertips. You can make annotations with an Apple Pencil, turn pages with a Bluetooth foot pedal, and create setlists. As I, Goh Ling Yong, often tell my students, organizing your practice materials is the first step to effective practice, and forScore makes that process seamless.
Tip: Scan your old, dusty sheet music books into PDFs and import them into forScore. It's a fantastic way to breathe new life into your old repertoire and rediscover forgotten favorites.
15. Melodics
If your instrument is a MIDI keyboard, electronic drum kit, or a pad controller, Melodics is the app you've been dreaming of. It takes the gamified, real-time feedback approach of apps like Yousician and applies it to the world of modern electronic music.
The lessons are created by contemporary artists and focus on skills like finger drumming, playing synth basslines, and building keyboard chops for genres like hip-hop, electronic, and pop. It's incredibly fun and feels more like playing a rhythm game than practicing scales.
Tip: Even if you're a traditional pianist, using Melodics with a MIDI keyboard can be a fantastic way to improve your rhythm and explore new creative avenues outside of classical or pop music.
16. Tomplay
Tomplay offers a unique and inspiring practice experience by providing interactive sheet music that scrolls along with real audio recordings from professional musicians. It’s like having an orchestra or a band in your living room, ready to accompany you.
The app offers a massive library of scores for dozens of instruments, from piano and violin to saxophone and cello. You can slow down the tempo of the recording, loop difficult passages, and even record yourself playing along with the accompaniment. This makes practice feel less like a solitary exercise and more like a true musical performance.
Tip: Choose a piece with a simple orchestral accompaniment. The feeling of playing your part while hearing the lush sound of a full string section swell around you is incredibly motivating and can remind you why you fell in love with music in the first place.
Your Reboot Starts Now
That dusty instrument in the corner isn't a monument to a skill you lost; it's an invitation to a joy you can reclaim. The biggest barrier to starting your passion project reboot is often just that—starting. Technology has removed so many of the old obstacles, offering structured lessons, endless inspiration, and patient practice partners right in your pocket.
Pick one or two apps from this list that resonate with you, tune up your instrument, and play one note. Then another. This journey isn't about perfection; it's about participation. It's about making time for yourself and rediscovering the unique, fulfilling language of music.
What instrument are you picking back up? Share your 'Passion-Project-Reboot' story in the comments below! We'd love to hear what you're playing.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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