Play along with a song

The quickest way to grow an ear is to put on something you love and find it. Play the song from another app (or the room), open the Tuner, and hum the note that feels like home — the one the song keeps coming back to. That is the key's root: tap Key and sing it; then tap the key’s name and pick Major or Natural minor by what the song feels like. Now the strips under the tuner name every note you sing against that key — 1, 5, ♭7 — which is the part worth learning; the letters are only what you call it today.

Then open Theory. The key's seven chords are the top row; most songs use four of them. Tap along with the changes until the chord you tap sounds like the chord you hear — the colours help: home is green, 4 and 5 cool, 3 and 6 warm, 7 and 2 red. When a chord in the song is none of them, look in the next row: it is probably borrowed, and the amber notes on the keys and the frets show exactly what it borrowed. In Prog, arm ● and the chords land as you play them, ready to transpose, play back and keep.

For the melody, the Scope's Musical view draws what you sing as a line against the key: a note in the key sits on a coloured band, a note outside it between them. For the words and the tune of a sketch, Record it and let the take's Analysis read back the notes, the key, the tempo and the chords it heard.

Desk

In one line. The home page: four tools stacked, the key and a keyboard under them, and every door.

Do this

1. A tool’s name is a door: tap Scope ›, Tuner ›, Metronome ›, Records › or Theory › for its page; the arrow at the top left comes back.
2. Each widget is its page’s head, live: the Scope’s view (tap its name for the next); the Tuner’s note and cents, the strobe under them; the Metronome’s tempo — drag the number, Tap, ▶ — with Clicks and Groove beside it; the Recorder’s clock, Loop, ● and Mark.
3. Key sets the key: play its root on the keys. ‹ › step it a semitone; the name opens every scale over the page, its notes and degrees at the top.
4. Above the keys: − C3 + moves the octave; the lock says what the next chord starts on; the clef is Bass, and Voicing on a tap; Arp switches the arpeggiator; the instrument’s mark steps to the next voice; Ped. is Hold, a sustain pedal. Hold the lock, Arp or the mark for its sheet over the page.
5. The chips above the keys are the key’s own chords, one tap each; under them, the keys.

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The Desk is where the app opens and where it stays while you play: everything a page does in depth has its head here, and a tap on its name goes down for the rest. Clicks and Groove by the tempo open over the page — a tap on Groove plays the kit or the tala, a hold opens its pane; the lock, Arp and the instrument’s mark do the same on a hold. The key bar is the same one on the Tuner and in Theory: one key, read by every page. Thumb side, in Setup, puts the doors and Theory’s rings under whichever hand you play with.

Tuner

In one line. Play or sing one note; the Tuner says which note it is and how far off.

Do this

1. Tap the mic in the top bar once; the phone asks, then it listens.
2. Play one note. The name shows; the needle leans flat or sharp; the strobe drifts until you are in tune, then stands still.
3. Read the two strips: every note, and its interval from the key’s home note (1, 5, ♭7).
4. A guitar? Strum reads every string at once. A drum? Drum reads the head lug by lug.
5. Set the key here: Key, then sing its root or tap it on the reference keys; ‹ › step it a semitone; the name opens every scale, its notes and degrees at the top — the Desk’s bar and Theory’s, here too.

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The strobe is the precise instrument: three bands, the lower drifting at the beat frequency, the upper ones two and four times faster — readable to a fraction of a cent once you trust it. The needle is for glancing. Hold a note inside two cents for half a second and the name glows once. Below, the two strips share columns: every note, and its interval from your key's tonic. Strum listens for every open string at once — hit them together and each column shows its string, dot rising sharp and sinking flat. The keyboard at the bottom is a reference note under your thumb. Drum reads a head's fundamental strike by strike: a head is not a string — the tone is inharmonic and short — so each strike is read once, just after the stick noise clears. Tap a lug on the ring, strike near it, turn the key and watch the number settle, then tap the next lug (or Next). A lug's colour is how far it sits from the ring's middle; even is the goal, then bring the whole ring to the pitch you want.

Scope

In one line. The Scope draws sound: your pitch against the key, or everything in the air at once.

Do this

1. Mic on, then sing: Musical draws your line against the key’s coloured bands.
2. Tap another view — Design · Spectrum · Wave · Stereo · Cymatics; Grid shows all six, tap one to open it.
3. Touch the display to read the frequency under your finger.
4. Freeze holds the picture; Clear wipes it.
5. The shelf under the display: Contrast, Relief, Colour; Hold keeps the peaks on Spectrum.

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Musical draws pitch against the key over time — colour carries pitch class, so a chord appears as distinct bands and a drifting note visibly loses colour. Design is the raw spectrogram: contrast lifts the floor and steepens the ramp together, relief lights partials from above, and the colour menu picks the mood. Spectrum is the analyser an EQ shows: level against frequency with instant attack, a smooth release, and a slow-fading peak-hold ghost. Wave is the oscilloscope — Auto locks the window to two cycles of the detected note so a held tone stands still; a fixed window (5–80 ms) holds the timebase steady instead. Stereo is a goniometer with a correlation meter: mono content stands upright, width tips the trace sideways, and the bar reads +1 when the sides sum cleanly, −1 when they would cancel. It needs a two-channel input — an audio interface or stereo USB mic; a phone mic is mono and honestly says so. Tap Musical, Design or Spectrum to read the frequency under your finger.

Theory — the harmony page

In one line. Set the key by playing its root; every chip is then a chord in that key, one tap each.

Do this

1. Key, play a note; ‹ › step it a semitone; the key’s name opens every scale — Major, minor, the modes and the rest — its notes and degrees at the top.
2. Tap chips in the top row: the key’s own chords, solid. The faded rows visit — borrowed chords, and the dominants that point home. (Setup can turn the rows the other way up: the key’s own at the bottom, nearest the keys.)
3. Hold a chip and slide: up for 7 · 9 · 11 · 13, down for sus4 · sus2 · 5, sideways to turn it over. A card at the top maps the slide — tap a cell with your other thumb to jump there. Its two small buttons: one moves it to the middle of the screen; the lock keeps it on the page, and then, with no chord in hand, a cell sets up the next one — pick 13 and a turn, press I; pick 5, press V. Lift and the chord lets go.
4. The row under the chips, over the instrument, is the Desk’s: the lock — what the next chord starts on: Triad, Carry, or Each (a chip keeps what you left it); the clef — Bass, and Voicing on a tap; Arp; the voice; the chord’s rung — △ · 7 · 9… tap to climb, hold for Type and Ext; Ped. holds.
5. See it below on the keys, the frets or the circle. Rings, beside the row, and Prog, the bar under the key — ● records as you play (to the click for real lengths), ▶ plays, Library has the common ones; sixteen bars a section — are the other ways in.

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Setting the key. Tap Key and play a note: that note is the root. The key’s name opens every scale and mode over the page, its notes and degrees at the top — Major and Natural minor head the list. To make your own, choose New scale… at the end of that list and play its notes (a note played again leaves it), then Done — it is kept under Custom, named by its degrees. ‹ › beside the name move the key a semitone; Rel, in the list’s head, goes to the relative major or minor.

Rings — a chord under two thumbs. The left ring is eight families: touch one and its triad sounds on the keys. Slide up a thumb-width and the chord climbs that family's ladder — a sixth, a seventh, a ninth, on up; slide down and it comes back. Slide sideways and it turns over: right for the next inversion, left for the one before. Lift, and it stays as you left it. The right ring is the circle of fifths with your key on top and the key's own chords brighter; under each root is its degree in the key, named against the major scale as everywhere in the app, so in C minor the in-key E♭ reads ♭3 and is bright — and, for a root in the key, the quality the key builds on it: 2m, 7°, 4. Touch a root and the chord sounds from it; slide to the next and it moves; lift and it lets go — unless Hold is on, when a root stays until you tap it again. The dots by the rim of the left ring are the families that stay in the key from the root in hand (the one sounding, or the last touched, or the tonic), each on the chord the lock would start it on; the chord's name on the right says in key when every note of it is. With Key armed, the first root you touch becomes the key. Each ring's readout sits on a short line beside it, clear of the thumbs. The lock in one corner says what a new family starts on — Triad: its triad; Carry: the height and inversion you had (a minor ninth becomes a major ninth); Each: wherever that family was last left. The two-dot button in the other corner sets which rings sit high: the left, both low, the right, both high. With Thumb side on Left in Setup the rings swap sides and mirror, and the two buttons swap corners with them, so the same five common families sit under a left-hander's chord thumb.

Snap (a rail in Voicing): Scale makes a key outside the key play the nearest note in it — and while a borrowed chord or a secondary dominant rings, its own notes take over (hold Fm in C and A plays A♭). Chord keeps to the ringing chord's notes. Chords themselves are never snapped; the key that lights is the note you hear.

One primary key; everything reads against it. The chord grid's columns are semitones above the tonic, so a chord's position is its distance from home: borrowed chords fill the flat columns between the diatonic ones, and a secondary dominant stands on its own root wearing its target's name. Colour is tension: home is green, 4 and 5 cool blues, 3 and 6 yellows, 7 and 2 reds; a flat column wears the degree it alters, dimmed, and a secondary dominant is painted like its target — the colour is the arrow. Chips sound while touched; Hold latches them. A chip held can slide, on one ladder: up a thumb-width for the chord's next extension (a seventh, a ninth, on up to the thirteenth), down from the triad for sus4, then sus2, then the bare fifth; right turns it over an inversion, left turns it back. The chip names what it is on and the Type and Ext rails follow the finger. The lock in the row says what the next chord starts on: Triad, the rails as you set them; Carry, where the slide left off (the rails move with it); Each, where that chord was last left. A second finger on another chip takes the chord over, and the first finger lifting lets nothing go. The line under the keys names what sounds — the chord with its letter, its notes, a word about it. The page lands at its bottom — chords against the instrument, everything else stacked upstairs. One button in the row under the chips reads the rung every chip stands on — △ · 6 · 7 · 9 · 11 · 13, s2 · s4 · 5; a tap climbs, a hold opens its two rails: Ext — 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13 — stacks triads up to thirteenths (the sixth is the triad with its sixth added; past the seventh, chords are named the way a musician would name them, alterations in brackets) and Type swaps the third for a sus2 or sus4, or drops it entirely for a bare power chord. Type reshapes whichever chord a row already built, so a suspended borrowed chord is still borrowed and a suspended secondary dominant still targets the same degree; picking Sus2, Sus4 or Pwr caps Ext at whatever formula that shape actually has (Sus4 stretches one step further, to the real 7sus4). The slide moves both rails live.

The dock below shows one instrument at a time. On the keys, a lane under the keyboard marks what sounds: the chord's root a filled dot, the other notes rings, the same note in another octave a faint dot. A note from outside the key fills amber, so a borrowed chord shows what it borrowed; a root from outside keeps its violet under an amber edge. The frets cover 0–12 in any tuning, including your own (the ✎ button; Setup has a left-handed neck): named markers for the chord, the rest of the key as small violet dots, borrowed notes amber, the twelfth fret the hollow echo of the open strings. The circle of fifths draws your progression as a path — its shape is how far the harmony travels — and each chord change as lines from where notes were to where they went. Everything the progression touches is tinted on all three.

The progression

In Prog, ● and play. To the click — Click in the pane starts it, Tap sets its tempo — each chord is as long as you held it, to the beat, read off the metronome's own clock: the way to record anything you mean to keep. Free, each chord is the length set under Each, half a bar, one or two, and nothing is guessed from the gaps between taps. Sixteen bars at a glance, four to a row, make a section; past them the next chord opens section B, or + opens one on purpose, and the strip A · B · … shows how one moves into the next; ▶ plays them all. Tap a block to hear and edit it; transpose moves the letters and leaves the numerals alone, which is the entire point of numerals. Saved progressions stay on this device.

Metronome

In one line. A click you can lean on, with drums under it and a plan that changes meter and tempo on its own.

Do this

1. ▶ starts it. − + or a drag on the number sets the tempo; Tap taps it in. The meter is the small menu by the title.
2. Tap a beat’s dot: accent, soft, silent, plain.
3. Clicks: pulse, accent and subdivision, each with its own sound and level; swing; a polyrhythm.
4. Groove: a kit or a tala under the click, tuned to your key.
5. Seq: a sequence — so many bars of one meter, then another, the tempo kept, related or ramped. ms·Hz: the tempo as milliseconds and hertz.

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Three layers — pulse, accent, subdivision — each with its own sound and level, and swing on any duple subdivision, from straight to the full triplet feel. Poly adds a second stream against the pulse — three over two, four over three, up to nine over nine — with the meeting point accented. Seq is a practice plan: so many bars of one meter, then another, with the tempo per step kept, set, related or ramped. The ms·Hz tab converts the tempo to milliseconds, hertz and samples for delays and LFOs.

Relating a tempo is metric modulation: a note value before the barline lasts as long as another after it, so the pulse you already hold carries across. The symbols read left to right, old to new. ♩ = ♩. the quarter becomes the dotted quarter (into compound time; 120 → 180). ♩. = ♩ the reverse (out of compound time; 180 → 120). ♪₃ = ♪ the triplet eighth becomes the straight eighth (×3/2), ♪ = ♪₃ the reverse. ♪ = ♩ the eighth becomes the quarter (double time), ♩ = ♪ half time. ♪₅ = ♪ the quintuplet eighth becomes the straight eighth (×5/4), ♪ = ♪₅ the reverse. A plan without a ramp starts every loop from the dial, so a relation never compounds; a ramp adds its BPM at every barline inside the step and carries on across loops until it reaches its target — the tempo trainer.

Groove plays a bar of drums under the click — kick, snare and hat, or the theka of a tala on bayan and dayan. Choosing one sets its meter; a tala brings sam, tali and khali with it (khali is a soft beat, not a silent one). The kit is tuned to the key you are in: the dayan rings on Sa, the bayan and the kick two octaves below, so the metronome sits inside what you are practising.

Records

In one line. Record from any page; a take keeps its sound, its marks and tags, and can be read back as notes, chords and words.

Do this

1. ● in the top bar or on the Recorder; ● again stops, and the take opens: play, scrub, Mark, tag, Share.
2. Source says what the take hears: Room, Keys, or Both.
3. Loop makes it a looper: ∞ free, or 1 · 2 · 4 · 8 bars at the click.
4. ●. Free: the loop starts on your first note and ● again closes it, right where you press — on whole bars when the click is running. Bars: it plays after the first pass.
5. From then on ● flips Play and Dub: every pass you dub is a layer, up to seven. ■ stops (hold to clear); ✓ keeps the loop as a take; hold ● to undo.
6. Under the wave while it goes round: ⇄ turns it over, ½ · 1× · 2× speed with pitch following, Resample folds the layers into one lane for seven more, ×2 · ×4 · Free the next layer’s length. Earphones for anything through the mic.

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Record from the top bar on any page, or from the Recorder card. Takes carry marks and #tags; Source says what the take hears — the room, the keys, or both — and Keys brings the keyboard and the key's chords up under the page. With Loop set to a number of bars the recorder is a looper — the take goes round at the metronome's tempo, pass after pass, and keeps the last full one when you stop. Meters show peak, RMS and loudness (momentary and short-term LUFS). In the live trace, the solid core is the energy below 400 Hz and the pale fringe is everything above — a bass line reads as a spine, cymbals as air. Analysis is on-device: melody transcription, key and tempo estimates, intonation, and the chords it heard, each with a confidence. Monophonic material transcribes best; the dictation says how sure it is. Words (on the phone) reads a voice note back as text with the system's on-device recogniser — nothing leaves the phone — and the text is searchable in the library. Words and Analysis read the lane you have chosen in the take.

Notes and chords, on the phone. Read a lane and the phone hears it with Spotify's Basic Pitch, a small model that hears several notes at once — a strummed chord, two hands — on the device; nothing is sent away. Every note is drawn where it sounded, in ink when it sits in the key the notes make, and the chords are read bar by bar from them, by the take's own tempo when it was made to the click. Play as MIDI sends the notes out of the MIDI door as they were played; Export .mid writes a MIDI file you can drop into a DAW.

To develop a take under the pedal. 1. Loop on — A to B, or nothing set for the whole of a loop take. 2. Dub. The take goes round under the pedal in the card below: its lanes are the layers, playing; ● is Play ↔ Dub, hold ● undoes, ■ stops; ⇄ · speed · ×1 ×2 ×4 · Free · Resample as ever (Resample on a whole loop only). 3. ✓ keeps it: a loop take's lanes become the session's; a plain take gains the new layers as lanes from A. Hold ■ to leave the take as it was. A lane that goes round (×2, Free, a loop's) repeats to the end of the take on the tape. Earphones for anything through the mic: a dub is placed by the route's own delay, and the first layer tunes it against the click.

Acoustics

In one line. Numbers about sound in air: how long a note’s wave is, how far an echo flew, which notes a room exaggerates.

Do this

1. Type a frequency, or pick a note: its wavelength and period.
2. Type a delay: the distance an echo flew, and the first notch it carves.
3. Type a room dimension: the modes it will boom or swallow.

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Frequency to wavelength and period; delay time to distance in air and the first comb-filter notch; a room dimension to the axial modes it will exaggerate.

Private by construction

In one line. Nothing leaves this device unless you send it.

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No account, no analytics, no tracking. Recordings, progressions and settings live on this device. Two things leave, and only when you send them: a note from Feedback, with a picture of the page if you attach one; and your takes to your own iCloud, if you turn that switch on in Setup.

Symbols

In one line. Every glyph and short word a button wears, in one place.

• ● — Record. While a loop runs, the pedal: record · play · overdub. Hold it to undo the last layer.
• ■ — Stop the loop where it stands. Hold to clear it.
• ✓ — Keep the loop as a take.
• ∞ — A free loop: as long as you make it.
• ⇄ — Turn the tape, or the loop, over.
• ½ · 1× · 2× — Speed; the pitch follows, like tape.
• ×2 · ×4 · Free — How long the next layer is: so many passes, or its own length.
• Resample — The layers folded into one lane, as heard, so seven more can go on top.
• ♩ — The click: its lane in a take; the tempo a take was made to.
• ‹ › — The key a semitone down or up.
• Key — Set the key by playing its root — on the Desk, the Tuner or in Theory; ‹ › step it; the name beside it opens every scale, with its notes and degrees.
• A · B · + — Prog’s sections, sixteen bars each; + starts the next with the next chord.
• Click · Each — In Prog: the click, to record in time; or the length of each chord recorded free.
• Ped. — Hold: keys and chips stay down, like a sustain pedal; off lets everything go.
• The bass clef — Bass: the root an octave under the keys, beneath every chord; lit while it is on. A tap opens Voicing in a sheet over the page — Bass in its head, then shape, inversion, range, shared notes, Snap.
• The lock — Next: what the next chord starts on. Open, Triad; closed with an arrow, Carry; closed with a dot, Each. On the Desk and in Theory’s row a tap cycles it; hold it for the three with a word each, help, and Reset — every chip itself again.
• The lock on the card — keeps the ladder card on the page when the chord lets go; then, with nothing in hand, a cell sets up the next chord’s rung and turn. The other button moves the card to the middle.
• The instrument’s mark — Sound: keys, a pick, a bolt over keys, pipes, a fiddle, a wave — the voice you are on. A tap steps to the next; hold it for the voice, the room, tone and level, in a sheet over the page.
• The steps — Arp: a tap switches it on or off; hold it for its rhythm, pattern and rate, in a sheet over the page.
• The drum — Groove: its tab on the Metronome page, the switch under the name; on the Desk a tap turns the kit or tala on or off, and a hold opens its pane over the page.
• The metronome — Clicks: the click’s layers, swing and polyrhythm — its tab on the Metronome page; on the Desk, a sheet over the page.
• The lines · the wave — Seq and ms·Hz, the Metronome page’s other two tabs: a plan of bars, its switch under the name; the tempo as milliseconds and hertz.
• Loop — on the Desk’s recorder: off · ∞ · 1 · 2 · 4 · 8 bars; hold it for off. The same chip as the Recorder’s.
• △ · 6 · 7 · 9 · 11 · 13 · s2 · s4 · 5 — The chord button in Theory’s row: the rung every chip stands on. A tap climbs; a hold opens Type (Triad · Sus2 · Sus4 · Pwr) and Ext (3 · 6 · 7 · 9 · 11 · 13).
• Lock: Triad · Carry · Each — What the next chord starts on: its triad; where the last slide left off; where that chord was last left.
• 5 · s2 · s4 · △ · 6 · 7 · 9 · 11 · 13 — The ladder a held chip climbs, bottom to top: the bare fifth, sus2, sus4, the triad, the sixth, then the stack.
• V7¹ · V7₃ — A chip turned over: the figure is the inversion, raised when the bass went up, lowered when the top came down.
• The lane under the keys — a filled dot is the chord’s root, a ring another note of it, a faint dot the same note in another octave; amber is a note from outside the key.
• Colours — tension, one hue per degree: home green, 4 and 5 blues, 3 and 6 yellows, 7 and 2 reds. A faded chip visits from outside the key.
• ¢ — cents: a hundredth of a semitone. BPM — beats per minute, the tempo. Hz — cycles per second, the pitch as a number.

1. Intervals — the distance between two notes

Everything starts here. An interval is how far apart two notes are. The smallest step on a piano, one key to the next, is a semitone; twelve of them bring you back to the same note, higher — an octave, the one interval everyone hears as "the same note again". Every other interval has a name by how many letter-steps it spans — second, third, fourth, fifth — and a size, major or minor, perfect, diminished or augmented. A fifth sounds open and strong; a third sounds sweet; a second rubs. That character is the same in every key, which is the whole secret of hearing music by ear.

Try it. On the Tuner, sing a note, then sing another above it. The lower strip names the interval from your key's home — P5, M3, m2.

2. Scales and keys — picking seven notes and a home

A scale is a chosen set of notes, in order, climbing an octave; the ones most music uses have seven. A key is a scale with a home note, the tonic, that everything else leans toward — the note a song comes to rest on. Count up from home and every note has a number, its degree: the tonic is 1, the fifth above it is 5, the note just under home is 7. The two scales everyone knows are major, bright, and minor, darker; the other seven-note orderings are the modes, the same notes with a different home. A note that is not in the key is named by what it alters — ♭3, ♯4, ♭7.

Try it. Setup → Note names → 1 2 3. Now every key and chip reads by degree, and the pull of 7 up to 1 is a thing you can watch.

3. Chords — notes stacked in thirds

A chord is three or more notes sounding together. The usual way to build one is to take a note, skip one, take the next, skip one, take the next — stacking thirds. Three notes make a triad, the basic chord; its bottom note is the root, and the chord is named after it. Whether the third above the root is major or minor decides whether the chord sounds bright (major) or dark (minor); a squeezed fifth makes it diminished, a stretched one augmented. Keep stacking and you get sevenths, ninths and so on — more colour, same root.

Try it. Theory → Rings. A family under one thumb, a root under the other: every root sounds that chord type, and the ring’s words name it.

4. The key's own chords — diatonic chords and numerals

Build a triad on each of the seven degrees using only the key's notes and you get the key's seven chords, the diatonic ones. They are written as Roman numerals by degree — in major: I ii iii IV V vi vii° — capitals for major, small for minor, ° for diminished. The numerals are the point: a song that goes I–V–vi–IV is the same song in every key, and most songs are four of these seven. The V chord (the dominant) pulls hardest back to I; that pull, and its release, is a cadence.

Try it. Theory → Key: the top row is the seven, coloured by tension — home green, 4 and 5 cool, 3 and 6 warm, 7 and 2 red. Tap I, V, vi, IV.

5. Colour from outside — borrowed chords

Songs get their colour by stepping outside the key for a chord and coming back. A borrowed chord is taken from the parallel key — the minor with the same home note, usually — so a iv or a ♭VI in a major song is a cloud passing over, and a bright IV in a minor song is a window opening. Only one or two notes are new; the rest of the chord is still in the key, which is why it feels like the same place with the light changed.

Try it. Theory → Key, second row. Tap iv or ♭VI; on the keys and the frets the borrowed notes light amber, the rest stay violet.

6. Pointing at a chord — secondary dominants

Every chord can have its own V, a chord a fifth above it that pulls toward it the way V pulls toward I. Used that way it is a secondary dominant, written V/V or V/ii: "the five of five", "the five of two". It briefly treats another chord as home, then lands on it. A dominant seventh is the usual shape, because its pull is unmistakable — you can hear where it is going before it gets there.

Try it. Theory → Key, third row. Tap V/V, then V. The raised note (♯4 in major) lights amber; the chip wears its target's colour.

7. Which octave each note sits in — voicing

A chord's notes can be spread any way across the keyboard; that arrangement is its voicing. Voice leading is moving from one chord to the next so that each note travels the shortest distance — notes the two chords share stay put, the others step. It is why a piano player's hands barely move, and why the Theory keys barely move between chords.

Try it. Theory → Voicing: Voice-led, and Range Octave keeps every note on the keys you see. Tap I then IV and watch which keys stay lit.

8. Hearing it — relative pitch

Put it together and this is the skill: relative pitch, hearing where a note or a chord sits in the key, not what it is called. Almost nobody hears that a note is an E; almost anybody can learn to hear that it is the 5, because a 5 has a feeling and that feeling is the same in every key. The same goes for chords — a vi feels like a vi in any song. That is why this app will name notes by degree, why the Tuner's lower strip reads intervals from home, and why the chips are numerals. Play along with a song you love, find its home, and the rest of this page turns into things you have heard a thousand times.

Try it. The "Play along with a song" section above. Ten minutes a day with records you know is the whole method.

The road ahead

Where this is going, in order.

• Out of beta. TestFlight now, the App Store next. One price, once, no subscription, no account.
• Audio from the computer. A small companion on the Mac sends what the DAW is playing over the same cable, so the Scope and the Tuner can look at it and a take can record it.
• Takes that follow you. The library as a folder of your own — iCloud Drive, or any cloud you point it at — with photos and videos beside the sound, under the same rule: nothing leaves unless you send it.
• A web version. The same workbench in a browser already runs, on the desk next to the DAW; it reads the same folder once the library is one.
• Snap, further. The looper's grid doing more of the tidying for you.
• Instruments beyond the guitar. More tunings, more necks, the same lane and colours on each.

If something here matters to you, say so in Feedback, in Setup. If you would like to help it get there, write to me from the site.