The Essentials of Music.
Reimagined as a Native Part of iOS.
On your Home Screen, Lock Screen,
Dynamic Island, and in Control Center.
Utility at the system-level.
Music Tools is the first iOS app to take essential musician utilities and free them from the container of the main app. A Live Activity metronome that stays in the Dynamic Island as you look for sheet music online. A Control Center toggle to instantly take you to the full screen piano. A pitch player that lives on your Home Screen.
Together, the utilities are part of Music Tools form an ecosystem of access points. Seamlessly integrated and designed with one coherent visual and functional language. Behind every interaction is a simple principle:
The closer a tool is to your fingertips, the more seamless your musical workflow becomes.
Legacy Tools
For generations, musicians have relied on mechanical devices to keep time, find pitch, and tune their instruments. Metronomes, tuning forks, and pitch pipes were tactile and precise, but also fragile, bulky, and increasingly impractical. Today, most have fallen out of everyday use or declined in quality; modern plastic pitch pipes, for instance, often vary so widely in pitch that few ensembles still trust them.
Other Apps
App stores are full of apps marketed to musicians. Typically, these apps only perform a single function well, and are otherwise full of advertisements and bright branding. Because these apps monetize the time that musicians spend looking at their screen, they have little incentive to make their tools easy to reach; and every incentive not to.
Music Tools
Music Tools presents a new chapter; the modern-day equivalent of a musical Swiss Army Knife. It's a true utility that breaks with the paradigm of locking features away behind an app icon. Instead, these features are available to users alongside other utilities like the phone's flashlight or calculator. Even the app’s name is intentionally understated. It's easy to remember, easy to find, and focused entirely on what matters: the tools themselves.
Tools evolve. Music endures.
A Musician's Take on a Music App.
I'm Kilian, the creator of Music Tools! I designed and coded this app for fellow musicians like myself. Music Tools is for everyone. No matter if you're just getting started learning an instrument, if you want to figure out what key your favorite song is in, or if you're a professional musician who needs a reliable and powerful app for rehearsals and performances; Music Tools is designed to be inclusive.
The Story.
I grew up making music, taking photos, and working on science projects. When I finished school at 18, I founded the social start-up "Aletho" to house refugees in private accommodation. Eventually, I decided to study law to be able to see projects like this through end-to-end.
Left to right: (1) A photo of Kilian at the "Jugend forscht" science competition, taken from a newspaper article; (2) Kilian presenting at CeBIT 2016 trade fair for his social start-up "Aletho"; (3) Kilian recording a piano track for a Christmas album he produced with his friends.
My law studies took me to Oxford, where I joined the a cappella group "The Oxford Commas". Music Tools started as a way to make our rehearsals easier.
See what happens when you click or tap on the polaroids.
In Oxford, I also joined the Chapel Choir of Wadham College and organized a joined tour of the choir and The Oxford Commas to the Rhineland region in Germany in the summer of 2024, together with my good friend Quinton Lee. Stephen Taylor served as conductor.
An audio recording of the ending of "O Radiant Dawn", taken during one of our concerts on the Rhineland tour
Inspired by the People Who Use It.
Music Tools has grown through constant dialogue with musicians of every kind, from choral singers and pianists to instrumentalists like violinist Juli Bazzazi, who tested and helped shape the upcoming tuner. Her feedback inspired features that make the app feel more personal and precise, like having instrument-specific tuner configurations, or visually communicating pitch reliability through light intensity. Collaborations like these are what keep Music Tools alive and evolving.
Left to right: (1) Juli Bazzazi; (2) Juli and Kilian in conversation.
Good design doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in rehearsal, in conversation, and in music shared between people.