If you have ever wanted to play the guitar, then you can always install Nootka on your Windows PC or on your Android smartphone. Nootka is designed to help you learn the classical score notations and you can also practice your guitar playing skills. It supports acoustic guitar, classical guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar or any other instrument of your choice. In fact when you launch the program for the very first time, it asks you what type of guitar you are going to use.
What Nootka really teaches you is to read the music notation. If you know how to read the music notation, then you can play a tune on any instrument whether it is a guitar or a piano. If you choose one of the guitars, then you can see the picture of guitar in the Nootka window. Nootka listens to your real guitar through the microphone of your PC and identifies the musical notes as you play them on your guitar. For this to work, you should either play your guitar close to your PC in quiet surroundings or just connect the guitar’s audio cable to the audio-in jack of your PC (you will have to change the settings in Nootka to make sure it listens to audio-in or microphone).
If you want to learn about the music notations and playing the guitars, then you can choose any of the lessons by clicking on the Lessons icon in the toolbar. Each of these lessons contains exercises and exams for various levels. You have to play the displayed notes on your guitar and if you make mistakes Nootka shows you your error and corrects them.
Verdict: For an music student who wishes to learn about musical notations and playing guitars, Nootka can be a really indispensable tool. It does not use system resources that much and works on various platforms like Windows, Linux or Android.
You can download Nootka from https://sourceforge.net/projects/nootka/.