Developed by the music-tech startup Band Industries, known for creating the automatic tuner device Roadie Tuner, the Roadie Coach is a hardware device that, when used with its app, aims to assist users in developing their skills with an acoustic or electric guitar, ukulele, or even singing. But this is just one of the functions that the small device can perform, as we will explore here.

Hardware Setup
Upon opening the package, you can notice the care taken with the packaging, where all the necessary components for assembling the device have their designated and protected spaces, preventing damage during transport. The package contains the device itself, a standard USB / USB-C cable for charging and file transfer, 3 clamps of different sizes, and another type of rotational grip which I will detail shortly.

I was surprised to find that the clamps are made of metal, which is excellent because it is likely the first component to break after some time of use. The sizes are well thought out to cover everything from the widest Gibson folk guitar to the thinnest Stratocaster guitar—technically, the clamps accommodate instruments ranging from 1.45 to 5.39 inches or 3.7 to 13.7 centimeters in thickness.

Reading the quickstart guide, I discovered that the extra rotational grip can be used instead of the standard one and is designed for rounded-body instruments like those made by Ovation guitars—a clever move by Band Industries.

Due to the compact design of the Roadie Coach, it was relatively easy to find an ideal spot to place it where it wouldn’t obstruct the pickup panel while keeping its microphone pointed towards my head and its display easily accessible.

The first time you turn on the device, it prompts you to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi and searches for updates online. Make sure your firmware is up to date to utilize the latest features of the device, such as practice detection and MIDI. The device will update and reboot.

Once the hardware is properly secured to your instrument, it’s time to download the app. The Roadie Coach App is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch running iOS 15.0 or later, Mac running macOS 12.0 and/or Apple M1 chip or later, and Apple Vision with visionOS 1.0 or later. It is also available on the Play Store for devices running Android 7.0 or higher.

App Setup
I installed the Roadie Coach on my iPad and my Android phone and was pleased to find that the Roadie Coach hardware centralizes the functions of the apps installed on your mobile devices, regardless of which device you are using, as long as they share the same internet connection. You can access your goals and stats, as well as recordings made within the Roadie Coach hardware.

The app offers a 2-month free trial, which is enough time to test out the advanced features before deciding whether to continue.

You can skip this step and use the Roadie Coach app for free, which includes some public domain songs and lessons in 'easy' mode. However, if you want access to a vast library of songs and advanced lessons for the chosen instrument, it's recommended to subscribe.

The app will prompt you to choose what you want to practice with options for Guitar, Guitar + Singing, Ukulele, and Ukulele + Singing, and your skill level divided into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Once you’ve set your preferences, it’s time to ‘get jamming.’

On the first page of the app, you can access the device to view and download your recordings to your mobile device. I will delve into these features later in this article. Here, you can also see your goals and stats, including how much time and frequency you’ve practiced, the songs you’ve worked on, a weekly practice plan with a list of songs selected by the app for you to practice, a button that displays the collection of songs constantly updated and available in the app divided into rock, pop, and jazz, and finally, video tutorials with a small course on the chosen tier divided into chapters/lessons. When you select a song, at the top of the page, there are two buttons. The first has a pitchfork icon and is a surprisingly accurate tuner. The first time you click on it, it will ask: "Do You Know How to Tune?" with two available options: "Teach me how" and "I Know how to tune." I must say, that’s more than any teacher ever offered me in my early days of learning how to play guitar. "Teach me how to tune" opens a video tutorial, while "I Know how to tune" leads to the app’s tuner, which will ask for permission to use your phone’s mic when enabled for the first time. Next to the tuner button is the "Full Tabs" button, which gives you access to a page with everything you need to know about the selected song: chord tabs, strumming patterns according to your chosen skill level, lyrics with chord notations, and a media player where you can hear the song's chords and/or melody while following the lyrics. The player can also play at different speeds that you can choose from.

Learning to Play and Sing with Roadie Coach
Before you start with the practice levels, you can listen to your chosen song from YouTube at the click of a button to make sure you know what you’re aiming for. Here’s a quick overview of the learning levels:

• Level 1 - Learn Chords
  The app shows you basic chord charts for you to strum and learn the song’s chords. Once you play them, the app evaluates if you’re playing the correct chord and may ask if your guitar is tuned if you make mistakes. You’ll receive a score ranging from 0 to 3 stars based on your performance, evaluated by the percentage of requirements you met in each lesson.
  
• Level 2 - Play at Your Pace
  The app accompanies your strumming while playing the melody at your own pace.
  
• Level 3 - Basic Play Along
  In this level, the app sets the pace and asks you to follow the strumming pattern. It’s very accurate and closely follows the song’s difficulty level (easy, intermediate, or advanced). If you’re a beginner, it will ask you to strum a chord per measure. After the exercise, it will show you how your performance has been based on your accuracy in strumming the right or wrong chords at the right or wrong time and direction.
  
• Level 4 - Add Strum Pattern
  Now that you can play the right chords at the right time, the app adds a strumming pattern (up and down). It will evaluate you based on the strums you got right or missed.
  
• Level 5 - Learn the Melody
  This level shows you a grid resembling a MIDI score with the lyrics’ syllables above the notes so you can sing along while targeting the tempo and pitch for later evaluation.
  
• Level 6 - Combine Skills
  Here, you need to play and sing as the app provides the chords, strumming patterns, lyrics, and melody for you to play along. You can set the app to focus on either the chords or the vocals, depending on which skill you’d like to practice more.
  
• Level 7 - Play the Original Song
  This level is the same as the previous exercise but played at the original tempo of the music.

Users are free to repeat any of the lessons at any time to improve their ratings.

It’s important that you take the necessary time to adapt to the app, as with any digital interface. Since I have been playing guitar for quite some time, I had to restrain my playing to provide the app with what it was programmed to ‘listen’ for in a beginner student. I decided to conduct an additional test by giving the Roadie Coach to someone who had never played guitar before—my nine-year-old son. The feedback was excellent. Once he understood how to read the chords and what the strumming pattern arrows meant—which can be learned through in-app tutorial videos—the device quickly became his new video game. He is now constantly improving his chord transition speed, and I truly believe Roadie Coach has sparked an interest in the instrument that I was never able to achieve. In no time, he will be able to play his first songs. As a dad in my 40s, it seems to me that Roadie Coach is a digital and interactive evolution of the old guitar magazines that my generation used to practice with, which is pretty cool.

Back to the Hardware
Another cool thing about Roadie Coach is its extensive usefulness beyond its guitar-playing learning capabilities. That being said, let’s dive into its standalone/app-bundled hardware features.

The color LCD touch screen display will show us icons as follows:

• Recorder
  Once pressed, it shows a large red circle to start recording, along with a button featuring ‘faders’ iconography that will lead you to different ways your audio can be captured. First, you need to choose whether you want it mono or stereo. Note that the device has three separate recording sources: a built-in omnidirectional microphone, a piezo-like pickup inside its top grip, and a P2 TS input jack for external line-level hardware. Choosing mono (1 channel) will lead you to select one of the three options, as well as displaying a slider for setting the input recording level of the chosen source. Using stereo (2 channels) shows you possible source combinations—Guitar+Mic, Guitar+Jack Input, and Mic+Jack Input—along with each input level slider to be adjusted. You may want to connect your headphones to the P2 TRS jack to monitor your recordings or simply listen to your already recorded tracks.
  
  Once you have recorded your sound, Roadie Coach gives you a range of options for storing, sharing, and playing back:
  
  • From the Hardware
    Your recordings will be listed in the ‘recorder’ section, and once clicked, you’ll have the options to play back through your headphones or any other line level device you choose connected to its TRS P2 output. Here, the displayed ‘faders’ icon in the top left corner of the screen will allow you to balance your sound (if you’ve chosen stereo capture) between the contact pickup and the microphone, as well as adjust the output master level. In the top right corner of the display, there’s a trash can icon for you to delete recordings.
    
  • From the App
    If you open your Roadie Coach app paired with the hardware via Wi-Fi connection, you’ll see the ‘coach’ icon at the top of your mobile device screen. Clicking on it shows you all of your recordings stored on your Roadie Coach device, and that’s where things get interesting. You can now download them to your mobile device, play them, edit the file name, adjust the contact pickup/mic levels, apply compression gain, open a three-band equalizer, and share the recordings with your friends or save them to yourself. I was really happy when I saw that I could choose which source I’d like to save/share because once you click, you can choose to export as WAV or MP3, the mixed track, mic only, or contact mic only. To have a multitrack recording of your singing and playing, just repeat the procedure, saving the mic sound once and the contact pickup sound the next time. Note that because of the omnidirectional microphone architecture and the fact that the hardware is closely attached to your instrument ‘mic only’ will bring a significant sound bleed from the instrument while ‘contact mic only’ works much better as an isolated sound source.
    
    I’ve done a simultaneous recording to compare the recording quality between my Android mic and the Roadie Coach so you can hear for yourselves. Please try not to focus on my poor performance of “Crash Into Me” by Dave Matthews
    
    Android Mic:
    
    
    Roadie Coach Mix:
    
    
    Roadie Coach Mic:
    
    
    Roadie Coach Contact Mic:
    
  
  As you can hear the omni directional microphone because of its architecture and the fact that it's attached to the instrument picks up most of the instrument sound leaving not much of a difference between the 'mic only' and the mixed version even though the 'contact mic' does a pretty good job isolating the strings' sounds.
  
• Tuner
  The contact-sensitive tuner within Roadie Coach surely adds to our ‘bang for the buck’ category. I’ve tested it against my built-in Takamine TK-40 preamp tuner, and I have to say that the Roadie Coach’s tuner is much more complete and accurate because of its detailed visual display and settings menu. Here, you can tweak the capture source (contact, mic, or external input), main frequency (all A4 frequencies ranging from 440 to 460 Hz), and capo position (ranging from -1 to 12). This is a really nice feature, probably inherited from other Band Industries’ equipment.
  
• Insights
  Here, you can see how much time you’ve spent practicing with Roadie Coach turned on, displayed by two color-coded circles, one inside another. The outer ring (green) shows how many minutes you’ve played today, while the inner circle (orange) shows how many days of your previously set streak you have completed. There’s also a total playtime count and your longest streak record just below the aforementioned rings.
  
  
  
• Settings
  Divided into the following tabs:
  
  • Audio
    On this tab, users can set the recording format (Opus and WAV) and sample rate (ranging from 8 to 48 kHz).
    
  • Storage
    Learn how much of Roadie Coach’s 8GB flash memory you’ve already used, and/or hit the ‘format memory’ button to erase all of your recordings.
    
  • Wi-Fi
    Configure your Wi-Fi preferences.
    
  • MIDI
    Personalize or restore default MIDI screens.
    
  • General
    Check Roadie Coach’s firmware version, IP address, MAC address, etc.

MIDI
Surprisingly enough, this was the first time I came across the term BLE-MIDI, which means ‘MIDI over Bluetooth Low Energy’ or, simply put, transmitting MIDI protocol via a Bluetooth connection. This is an awesome feature that I really wanted to explore.

• Using Roadie Coach as a MIDI Controller
  Best case scenario: you’re a macOS/iOS user running Ableton or GarageBand, so your setup should be fairly straightforward. However, if you’re a Windows user like me, there are a few steps you should take first to get Roadie Coach’s MIDI functionality working. But don’t worry—unlike most of the nightmarish Windows advanced configurations with buggy drivers and stuttered performances, this one won’t hurt a bit. All you need to do is download a couple of lightweight utility programs and, as with any other MIDI-based software you choose, know a thing or two about MIDI mapping.
  
  To cut the story short, I’ll link the step-by-step guide here on Roadie Music’s website: Using Roadie Coach as a MIDI Controller via BLE.
  
  Also, in the link above, you’ll find the specified CC values for MIDI mapping.
  
• MIDI Screens
  Roadie Coach’s integrated MIDI Control App comes to life once it’s properly configured and connected to the software of your choice. The device offers six distinct standard screens:

As you can see, the app covers you whether you’re controlling ‘one-hit’ functionalities like firing a whole playback track or individual notes, or tweaking live effects’ parameters, leaving endless control possibilities at the user’s disposal. Tap the notes with your guitar arm hand while using the strumming hand to stomp along in Roadie Coach. Just map the pads on the ‘Mixed Screen’ to your favorite drum set on your plugin/software/app and let the Katie Tunstall within you shine. Create vibey soundscapes by controlling modulation effects with the X/Y trackpad, strumming one chord per measure, or simply map your transport section to playback and stop a track to play along with a rhythm and/or harmony.

Physical I/O
Roadie Coach has two 3.5mm (P2) jacks: one stereo TRS output for headphones or line out, and one mono input, making it possible to receive audio signal from an external line level device such as a mixer or keyboard.

Conclusion
When I first saw Roadie Coach, I wasn’t really sure why anyone would need hardware for things you could do with just an app on your phone—until I realized its features extend far beyond simply learning how to play the guitar. Although you could use Roadie Coach to capture your instrument in a live performance environment its sound quality relates to its price tag and obviously suits best the domestic use even though it might save one’s life in an emergency situation. My 9 year old - who doesn’t speak english btw - could make use of Roadie Coach’s main features with quick directions so yes, very easy to use. As for the price, well, consider that you’d likely spend more than $200 on a contact pickup and digital tuner alone, so there’s your bang for your buck.

A travel case can also be bought separatedly for $29 now (Reg. $35)

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