Learn & Play Violin - tonestro

I love this app. It has features that tell you when you’ve played the correct note or missed it. It gives you feedback. It also has finger placement for the song it shows me where on the string my fingers need to be to play the note on the staff. Tonestro makes learning the violin fun, challenging and rewarding. I like that I can pick a song and learn to play it. In all fairness, I did play violin as a child and now I’m picking it up again in my senior years. This app has brought me the means to learn violin again. Love it so much!

I’ve been playing for awhile and I can say I have improved with this app. The biggest issues I’ve been having is when playing for score in lessons, the music stopping to wait for you to play right on time is unrealistic and robotic, and does not help with improvement. I either have to play the string early to avoid this or just live with it stopping every note. Both make the music sound horrible. I play much better with the listening option. If there was a way to turn this off and have the music play without stopping to wait it would be great. My second issue is not having a way to turn off the letters in the notes. It’s not helpful after awhile and inhibits memorization. I would rate five but these two issues are just too prevalent to ignore and interfere with the primary function of the app, which is to educate effectively in playing violin.

If I could give 0 stars, I would. The preview allowed me to see there were “beginner”, “advanced”, “experienced”, and “expert” songs (and therefore levels, which were locked until you pass the intro stuff)… not that I envisioned being a true professional from an app, but I figured the name of the lesson levels were fairly representative of the skills they covered. Wrong. Beginner, advanced, and experienced all work on the very basic (beginner) notes that elementary students learn. Worse still, the “experienced” lessons aren’t even complete! It says “more content coming soon”…. I emailed customer service, as I completed ALL the available content in less than 8 hours of play time. They ignored both emails I sent, a week apart. I finally got a response on Facebook messenger, and all they could say was “people learn at different paces”, and that they couldn’t tell me when the additional content would be available, if it would be available within the remainder of my subscription (which at that point was about 11 months to go), or how much further the additional content would teach. I detailed my concerns and asked if they had any solutions to offer (ie, refund, extend my subscription by however many months I have to wait for more material, etc) but they completely stopped responding to me at that point. I then directly asked for a refund, and still got no response. Their customer service is possibly a bigger joke than their content is. Don’t waste your money. Other music apps like Simply Piano are complete and useful- this app, which seemed promising- is definitely NOT. It’s nothing short of false advertising and a scam.