Apps for music teachers can help alleviate a big chunk of the day-to-day stresses of the job. There are apps that can help you store and annotate your sheet music, manage your business, compose your own music, and more.
We live in a truly digital age, where it seems there’s an app for pretty much everything—teaching music included. So, if you’re a private music teacher, it makes perfect sense to see what’s out there.
Why are apps useful for music teachers?
Not only can apps help music teachers ideate and keep students engaged, but they’re also great organisational tools, helping teachers plan sessions, organise their time, and give constructive, clear feedback to students.
Utilising some of the apps in this list could also help your business run more efficiently, giving you a competitive edge against other music teachers in your local area.
What are the best apps to use for music teachers?
We’ve chosen seven of the best apps for music teachers on the market, regardless of what instrument(s) you teach. Each app has a wide range of different features, too, so you’re sure to find one that works well for you.
1. forScore
Price: £19.99 (one-time purchase with an optional upgrade to forScore Pro for £9.99/year)
forScore is a great app for music teachers and general musicians who want to read sheet music straight from their smartphone or tablet.
At just £19.99, it can be a worthy investment, functionalities considered. The easy-to-use app is compatible across iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch and allows users to drag and drop multiple files from other devices into the forScore library.
The app also allows users to import PDFs and annotate them using forScore’s extensive variety of musical symbols. There’s even an auto-turn feature for scores with sequential pages, whereby the pages turn themselves without disrupting your flow—how handy is that?
Be it from your music stand or on the go, forScore offers the complete portable sheet reading experience without having to worry about losing or damaging physical copies.
2. Duet Partner
Price: starts at £15 per month, with a discount if you choose to pay annually.
Did you know that music teachers spend around two hours per day on average just on admin tasks?
Managing your calendar, lesson plans, and finances can sometimes feel like a full-time job in itself—and that’s before you’ve even turned up to teach a student. Thankfully, though, help is at hand in the form of Duet Partner (formerly known as Music Teacher’s Helper).
This handy app helps you update and keep track of student information, plan your schedule, prepare upcoming lessons, and stay on top of billing and invoices. In a nutshell, it looks after ‘the boring stuff’, leaving you with more time to do what you love—teach music.
3. Symphony Pro
Price: £12
Symphony Pro 6 (the latest app version) markets itself as a complete and intuitive app for writing music notation—and we can’t dispute that.
It allows you to compose music for just about any size ensemble, from the piano, symphonies, band, lead sheets, chord charts and guitar tabs. You can also write orchestral scores for up to 64 (yes, 64) instruments.
Symphony Pro’s built-in shortcuts and contextual menus allow you to easily edit note and bar properties, too, and if that’s not enough, you can even amend your scores by hand. Handwriting recognition is available as an additional in-app purchase, saving you valuable teaching time during lessons.
As well as starting new scores from scratch or pre-built templates, the app also lets you import your existing scores via MusicXML, MXL, MIDI, Dropbox, Mail, iCloud, Safari, or as an SP file from your computer.
4. Anytune Pro+
Price: £12
Anytune Pro+ is described as the ultimate practice app for singers, dancers and musicians—including teachers. With this app, teachers and students can learn, transcribe, practise and perform songs. You can adjust the tempo, choose the pitch, repeat loops, mark up a song, and much more.
Compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Anytune Pro+ has several capabilities, including ‘plug-in and play’, instrument or vocals isolation with ReFrame, and sound shaping with the FineTouch EQ.
Given all of the above, it’s hardly surprising that Anytune Pro+ is also the app of choice for many famous musicians. Bass guitarist, songwriter and producer Phil Soussan, who has worked with the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Billy Idol, said:
“Anytune Pro+ is as priceless as my personal trainer, helping me practise parts, songs or entire setlists. It organises my playlists and slows down tricky sections while remembering detune settings. With the LiveMix play-along feature, too, I can learn anything, anytime, anywhere.”
5. Tonal Energy
Price £2.98
When it comes to tuner apps for music teachers, Tonal Energy is considered one of the best, featuring both a tone generator and metronome as its stand-out functions.
The toner function, in particular, is an invaluable tool for teachers and can save precious lesson time on jam-packed days. The function allows you to manually select your key and instrument before giving you an emoji based on how in or out of tune your instrument is. Check out the clip above for a more in-depth explanation of how this works.
Tonal Energy’s metronome feature also means you can play in various time signatures. There are two beat options for 5/8 and 7/8, plus a range of other meters, divisions and subdivisions. Beats can be played, accented or silenced, depending on your preference.
You can also record yourself while using these two functions, which means you can keep practising with your students without getting too distracted by your iPhone or iPad.
6. Tonara
Price: ranges from £9.40-£23.50
If you teach primary school-age children, Tonara is the app for you. After all, one of your biggest challenges when teaching children is keeping learning fun and ensuring your students stay engaged and motivated to continue.
Tonara helps music teachers overcome these challenges and then some, providing several tools to add more fun and variation to lessons. Music teachers feel empowered with Tonara as it allows them to spend more time teaching while the app looks after the hassles of motivating practice and managing their studio or business.
Teachers can set assignments via Tonara, for which students can upload recordings for feedback, meaning the entire learning and assessment process can be housed in one place.
Tonara also tracks progress over time to celebrate student milestones and successes and offers game-like rewards such as badges, points, and stickers to keep younger musicians engaged.
7. Flashnote Derby
Price: £4.99
Like Tonara, the Flashnote Derby app is also suited to music teachers that work with young children, especially those who struggle to read and interpret notes.
Flashnote Derby uses a ‘horse race’ to time students and test how quickly they can identify certain notes. Their horse will quickly gain ground if they get the answer right but fall behind if they get it wrong. As the teacher, all you have to do is select the notes you want them to play, and you’re good to go.
Once good progress has been made, you can increase the difficulty by adding more notes and speeding up the race. Before you know it, your students will recognise notes of the treble clef, bass clef, or even the alto and tenor clefs with ease.
Specialist music teacher insurance with Insure4Music
Whether you teach from home, a school, or at a student’s house, it’s not just apps you need to be a successful music teacher. You should also consider specialist music teacher insurance to protect you in case something goes wrong.
Specialist music teacher insurance with Insure4Music is designed to protect you in the event of various incidents, including loss, theft and accidental damage. Our Public Liability insurance covers legal costs up to £5m and includes Professional Indemnity cover up to £1m.
What’s more—all of our music teacher policies can be tailored to meet your exact requirements. So, what are you waiting for?
Follow this link to learn more about music teacher insurance through Insure4Music or get a quick quote today.
Please note the information provided on this page should not be taken as advice and has been written as a matter of opinion. For more on insurance cover and policy wording, see our homepage.