Guitar Buddha Get the app
iOS · Free public beta this fall

A quiet room
for your
playing.

Three doors when you open the app: Learn a song, Capture an idea before it slips, or Practice the fundamentals. No streaks, no scoreboards. Just the work, and a place to keep it.

Download on the App Store
iPhone · iOS 16+ iPad · landscape native Local-first · no account
9:41
Evening, Anna.
Pick up where you left off
Blackbird
The Beatles · 2 days ago
Last take00:42
Takes11
BPM♩ = 96
finally got the F barre clean ✦
Recent songs
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd
3d
Landslide
Fleetwood Mac
1w
Hallelujah
Leonard Cohen
2w
Home
Songs
Ideas
Tuner
01 What it is

Three doors,
one quiet room.

Most music apps want you to grade yourself. This one just wants to be useful when you pick up the guitar. Three intents at the core, mapped to three cards on the home screen:
i.

Learn a song.

Add a tune, get chords-over-lyrics at song tempo, and loop the bar you keep flubbing. No grading, no “you missed a note.” Just the chart, your timer, and the part you're working on.

ii.

Capture an idea.

Record a riff before it slips. Scribble a lyric. Tag it as a riff, a verse, a chord shape, or a memory. The shelf keeps everything sortable and yours.

iii.

Practice the craft.

One workbench for chords, scales, drills, loops, and the metronome. Tuner is one tap from anywhere. The fundamentals, all in one tab — not scattered across four apps.

02 The loop

Pick a door.
Do the thing.
It stays.

Five screens, one quiet idea: stay out of the way once your hands are on the strings. Here's the whole app in five panels.
Three doors today
A quiet Sunday afternoon.
LEARN
a song
CAPTURE
an idea
PRACTICE
the craft
STEP 01

Pick a door.

Open the app and the choice is in front of you. No menu, no dashboard, no daily quest. Just the three things you actually came to do.

BLACKBIRD · VERSE 1
IntroV1ChSolo
GAm7G/B
Blackbird singing in the dead
CA7D7
of night, take these broken wings
0:42 · ♩=96 FOCUS
STEP 02

Learn a song.

Chords over lyrics at song tempo. Tap a chord to see the fingering. Tap a section to loop just that bar. Tap Focus to strip everything else away.

00:42 / 00:54
slow Am arpeggio · for verse?
Discard
Save to shelf
STEP 03

Catch the idea.

A riff lands. Tap record, play it, scribble a line about what it is, save. Tagged as a riff, verse, chord, or memory — your shelf, sortable, yours.

The workbench
ChordsScalesDrillsLoops♩
G
C
Em
D
OPEN · BARRE · 7TH · SUS
STEP 04

Practice the craft.

One workbench: chord library, scales, finger drills, loops, metronome. The fundamentals, all in one tab — not scattered across four apps.

TUNER · 6TH STRING
E 2
−4 cents · flat
−500+50
E A D G B e
STANDARD · 440 Hz
STEP 05

Tune up.

The Tuner is its own door in the bottom nav — one tap, never buried. Visual cents meter, harmonic check tone, every common alt tuning. Quiet and accurate.

03 The philosophy
Practice isn't a metric to optimize. It's a relationship to maintain. Guitar Buddha is the friend who remembers what you were working on — not the coach who counts your minutes.
Built by guitarists who got tired of feeling judged by their tools.
04 In the toolkit

The workbench,
and a tuner in reach.

Practice tab gathers the quiet utilities you'd otherwise have four apps for. Tuner sits in the bottom nav — one tap from anywhere. All offline. All free.
∷

Chord library

Searchable, every common voicing. Open, barre, 7ths, sus. Tap any chord in a tab to see the fingering inline — no app-switching.

∿

Scale library

Major, minor, modes, pentatonics, harmonic, melodic. Fretboard view. Hear it played at your tempo. Mark the ones you're working on.

⦿

Drills & Loops

Spider walks and picking patterns, plus 12-bar blues and modal vamps to solo over. Pick a tempo and run it for a set number of bars.

♪

Metronome & Tuner

Six metronome feels at any tempo or time signature. Tuner with a visual cents meter and harmonic check tone — always one tap from the nav.

05 Honest questions

Things people ask.

Local-first software, free public beta, no accounts. We built the answers we wanted from our own practice apps.
Is it really free? +
The public beta is free, with no ads and no upsell. When it ships v1, learning songs, capturing ideas, and the practice workbench all stay free. A small one-time purchase will unlock cloud backup and the ability to export your songs and ideas as a polished album-style timeline. We will never lock your existing recordings behind a paywall.
Where do my recordings live? +
On your device. Guitar Buddha is local-first — there is no account, no signup, and no cloud by default. Your songs, ideas, and library sit in your iPhone's storage and ride along with your iCloud Device Backup if you have one enabled. Optional opt-in cloud sync is on the v2 roadmap.
What instruments are supported? +
Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and ukulele at launch. The recording layer is instrument-agnostic — anything that makes sound through the iPhone mic, or via a plug-in interface, works. Tabs and chord diagrams adapt to the instrument you picked in onboarding.
Do I need to read tab? +
No. Guitar Buddha works without ever opening a tab viewer. The Learn tab gives you chord-over-lyric charts at song tempo, which is what most players actually want. If you import a six-string tab from somewhere else, the chord-and-lyric view will use it; otherwise the app builds a basic chart from the song's chord changes.
Can I import tabs from somewhere else? +
Yes — paste tabs as plain text from Ultimate Guitar, Songsterr, or any tab site that lets you copy-and-paste. The parser handles standard chord-over-lyric layouts and six-string tablature. We don't scrape or proxy other services; the import is fully manual and entirely on your device.
Will this work for total beginners? +
Yes — it's actually our favorite use. Guitar Buddha doesn't grade you, doesn't show you a score, and doesn't tell you that you're behind a curriculum. The three doors keep things simple: learn one song you love, capture the riffs that come out of noodling, and visit the workbench when you want to drill chords or scales. That's a full practice, with no curriculum to fall behind on.
Is there an Android version? +
Not at launch. We're a small team and chose to do iOS first so we could ship something polished. Android is on the roadmap if there's demand — sign up for the newsletter and we'll let you know when we start a beta.
06 Get the app

Quietly, it's the
most patient teacher
you'll ever have.

Free public beta this fall. Drop your email and we'll send you a TestFlight invite the day it opens.

iOS 16+ iPhone & iPad ≈ 32 MB No account needed