Guitar Tap

Improve your guitar quality by tapping.

Guitar Tap captures the sound of a tap on a guitar, tonewood plate, or brace, runs a high-resolution FFT, and reveals the resonant peaks and material properties that matter to luthiers. Use the results to guide your bracing, mass distribution, and plate thickness — methods drawn from Contemporary Acoustic Guitar Design and Build by Trevor Gore and Gerard Gilet.

Two ways to use Guitar Tap

Guitar Tap for iPhone, iPad & Mac

The polished native app — real-time spectrum, automatic tap capture, guitar / plate / brace measurement modes, saved measurements, comparison overlays, and PDF reports. One purchase works on all your Apple devices.

$14.99 — iPhone, iPad, and Mac (single purchase)

Coming soon to the App Store

Guitar Tap (open source)

A free, open-source edition for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Install a prebuilt release or build it yourself from source — and contribute on GitHub. Each download includes its own quick-start guide for the open-source edition; the shared User Manual below applies to both editions.

Free & open source

Download releases Source on GitHub

What it measures

Guitar mode

Identify the key body resonances — Air (Helmholtz), Top, Back, and more — each labeled with frequency, pitch, and Q factor, plus the tap-tone ratio.

Plate mode

Measure a tonewood blank: Young's modulus along and across the grain, speed of sound, specific modulus, radiation ratio, a quality grade, and a Gore target thickness.

Brace mode

A fast single-tap measurement of a brace strip's stiffness, speed of sound, specific modulus, and quality.

See it in action

Screenshots from the native Apple app — the open-source edition shares the same analysis engine and views.

Guitar mode: live spectrum with labeled Air, Top, and Back resonant peaks
Guitar mode — labeled resonant peaks
Plate mode: Young's modulus, specific modulus, and Gore target thickness
Plate mode — tonewood stiffness & Gore thickness
Brace mode: single-tap stiffness and quality of a brace strip
Brace mode — single-tap brace stiffness
Comparison mode: multiple guitar spectra overlaid with a frequency table
Compare measurements side by side
Guitar Tap on iPhone showing a frozen spectrum with labeled peaks
On iPhone — live spectrum
Guitar Tap on iPhone showing the analysis results panel with peak details
On iPhone — results panel
Guitar Tap on iPad showing spectrum and results panel
On iPad

Documentation & help

The User Manual covers both editions. The Quick-Start Guides differ by edition: the Apple app's is linked below; the open-source edition's is included in its download.

Learn more

Guitar Tap implements the tap-tone methodology from Contemporary Acoustic Guitar Design and Build by Trevor Gore and Gerard Gilet. To go deeper on lutherie technique, see the Lutherie Academy.

Support open-source development

The open-source edition of Guitar Tap is free and built in spare time. If it helps your work, a small donation keeps it maintained and improving — thank you!

Donate via PayPal