How to practise electric guitar on an iPad with an iRig

An iPad, an audio interface and headphones are all you need to practise electric guitar properly: real amp tone without waking the house, tab that scrolls at your tempo, and an app that can hear whether you played the right note. Here is the setup that works, in order.

What you need

• An audio interface. The IK Multimedia iRig HD 2 or iRig 2 are the common choices; any class-compliant USB or Lightning interface works. The guitar's pickups are far too quiet and the wrong impedance for the iPad's own microphone, so an interface is not optional.
• An amp sim. AmpliTube, Tonebridge, BIAS FX or the amp built into GarageBand. This is where your tone comes from.
• Headphones plugged into the interface, not the iPad. The iPad's speaker would feed the mic input and, worse, drown out what the practice app is listening to.

Order of operations

1. Plug the guitar into the interface and the interface into the iPad. Put on the headphones.
2. Open your amp sim, pick a tone, and leave it running in the background.
3. Open TabFollower. It takes the dry guitar signal from the interface and listens to it for pitch, while your amp sim keeps making the sound you hear. The tuner badge in the corner confirms it is hearing you.
4. Pick a song, set the tempo, and press Play. The band counts you in for one bar.

Latency, dropouts and other annoyances

• Quit other audio apps you are not using. Two amp sims fighting over the interface is the usual cause of crackle.
• Turn off Low Power Mode; it throttles audio processing.
• Very old Lightning cables and unpowered hubs cause dropouts. Plug the interface in directly.
• If the app stops hearing you after a cable swap, unplug and reconnect the interface and reopen the app. Always stop the song before unplugging.
• Keep the guitar's volume knob up. The pitch detector needs a clean, confident signal, and a half-rolled volume knob is the most common reason notes go unheard.

Why not a pickup through the microphone?

You can hear a guitar through the iPad's microphone, but a practice app cannot score it reliably: the mic also hears the backing band, the room, and whatever your amp sim is playing. The interface gives the app your guitar alone, which is what makes hit-and-miss marking honest.

More guides: Practising lead guitar with a backing band that waits for you · How to read guitar tab: strings, frets, and the symbols for hammer-ons, bends and slides · Guitar practice songs written by AI for your level, strings and frets. Or browse the free songs.