Learn songs. Capture ideas. Jam along to whatever you're chasing. Guitar Buddha is a practice companion that stays out of your way.
no streaks. no goals. just the songs.
Nothing tracks you. Nothing nags you. Everything stays on your device.
Pull songs from anywhere, or tell the library which chords you know — it'll show you what's ready to play and what's one chord away. Transpose any song and add a capo — chord shapes update instantly. Loop any passage, from a song or any audio you import, at half speed without shifting the pitch, or shift the key. Auto-scroll, one-tap simplify, PDF export, and setlists for jam night round it out. The library remembers everything you've sat with — quietly, in order of how recently it mattered.
Record an idea and Guitar Buddha detects its chords and key automatically. Sketch it out in the riff tab and play it back out loud, cursor following along. Hum it, play it, write it down — mark it as a riff, a lyric, a chord — and find it later.
Set a key. Pick a feel. Drums, bass, keys lock in behind you. Stack your own chord progression and the band plays it, transposing as you go — or pull up any song and it joins in with a groove that matches the feel. Start from a captured idea with one tap on "Jam in this key," or drill whole progressions in the ear trainer. Loop it, change it, record yourself over the top.
Standard, drop, open, DADGAD, and now Bass VI and baritone that reach down into the low end — twenty presets, plus fully custom and a sweetened mode for players who want it just-so.
Build a session — string together a warm-up, a song, and a few drills, then run it with a calm timer. No streaks, no pressure. Learn notes across the fretboard, or lock a scale to one position, color it by note or interval, and let Scale Coach listen while you climb it. Drill chord changes against the clock, or loop a strumming or fingerpicking pattern over any chord with the new trainers. Diagrams, scale grids, and a metronome round out the shelf.
The kitchen-stool half-hour. The hotel-room ten minutes. The morning before anyone else is up.
Metronome, tuner, and chord diagrams on Apple Watch. The tools you reach for most are one tap from your home screen.
Spin the Digital Crown to set the tempo. Feel every beat in haptics — no need to look down.
Open-string tuner on your wrist. Check your tuning mid-session without reaching for your phone.
The shape you need, right on your wrist. Tap Strum to hear it — without touching your guitar.
No accounts. No syncing to "the cloud." No data sold or shared. Your songs, your ideas, your takes — all yours, on your device.
Every feature, unlocked from day one. No subscription. No paywall. No ads tracking you between sessions.
Prefer the web? There's a $3 / $5 / $10 tip jar via Stripe too →
The app ships with four themes. Try them right here — your selection follows you down the page.
Before launch, a few dozen guitarists lived with the TestFlight build. Here's what they kept telling us.
Every guitar app turns practice into homework — streaks, XP, reminders shaming me at 9pm. Guitar Buddha just waits for me. I open it, it shows me what I've been working on, I play. I've played more this month than the whole past year.
I've lost so many riffs to voice memos I could never find again. Now I hum it, tag it, done. Found a riff from three weeks ago last night and built a whole song around it.
I expected the usual: free for 3 days, then $12.99/month for the "premium tuner." Nope. Everything's free, everything's on-device, it doesn't even ask for an email. Threw money in the tip jar immediately.
Set a key, pick a feel, and suddenly I have a band that's fine with practicing the same 12 bars for an hour. Recorded myself over a slow blues loop and actually heard myself improving week to week.
The loop trainer is a game-changer. I've been trying to get through the bridge of Blackbird for months — slowed it to 60%, isolated those eight bars, brought the speed up gradually. Played it clean for the first time last Tuesday.
40 years of playing and this is the first phone tuner I trust. Standard, drop, open tunings, plus a sweetened mode that makes my acoustic sound right up the neck, not just at the 12th fret. Soft display is easy on the eyes at 6am too. Quiet little masterpiece.
My guitar sat in a closet for a decade because every time I picked it up, I felt behind. This app never makes me feel behind. No goals, no progress bars — just the songs I love and a gentle "what's it gonna be today?" Playing every evening now.
Works completely offline, which matters when you're in a venue basement with no signal. Tuner, jam tracks, my whole library — all there. Wish recordings synced between my phone and iPad, but I get why they don't do cloud. Export works fine as a workaround.
Honestly — I like streaks and goals, and this app philosophically refuses to give me any. The tools are excellent, jam mode especially. If you're a calm-practice person you'll love it. If you need a drill sergeant, this isn't that, and it's proud of it.
No ads. No feed. No notifications begging me to come back. It opens fast, does exactly five things beautifully, and gets out of the way. Whoever made this actually plays guitar.
I built Guitar Buddha for the version of me who picks up the guitar at 11pm, plays for forty minutes, and forgets what he was working on by Tuesday. It's a place to put the practice. Quietly. Without anyone counting.
no newsletter. no drip. just the one.
no third parties — your email goes to a server we run, and nowhere else.