When I started taking guitar lessons, one of the first things I bought was a guitar chord book. It doesn’t matter whether your a beginner learning a “G major” chord, or an advanced player looking for jazz inversions; chord libraries are essential for building your musical vocabulary.
Here are 5 great guitar chord apps that you can keep handy on your mobile device for lessons, class, or home practice. None of them may equal Ted Greene’s “Chord Chemistry”, but they get close.
Couple quick notes:
- Reviews are based off of Number of Downloads, Ratings, User Reviews, and App experience.
- Apple tends to get great quality apps, but this time Android is king!
- App store reviews for iOS apps are shown for the most recent version and the overall history of the app.
Guitar Chord App List
Review: (10,616) 4.1 stars
By: Thomas Grapperon | website
Platform: Android
Overall Reviews: 10,638 (4.1 stars)
Price: Free
The Chord! set of apps for iOS and Android provide “the simplest and the most complete chords and scales app for guitar or any fretted instrument like bass, ukulele, banjo, etc.”
Chord! sets itself apart by computing all possible fingerings for a given chord, rather than simply storing a set of diagram pics.
This Chord! Free (Guitar Chords) app for Android boasts some impressive numbers with over 1million downloads, and over 10k reviews at 4.1 stars.
This free version is somewhat limited to a “fully functional chord search, but only 5 scales instead of 400 and 8 tunings, no reverse chord and scale search and no custom tunings database.”
2. 7 Chords
By: Handplant Studios | website
Platform: iOS
Reviews: 32(5 stars)
Overall Reviews: 1254 (3 stars)
Price: $1.99
In App Purchases: No
A definitive chord library. 7 Chords, by Handplant Studios, provides over 1500 easy-to-read chord diagrams in a nice clean format. This is a great reference guide for new to mid-level players.
Also nice to note that the latest version has a full five stars. It looks like earlier versions may have had usability problems, but Handplant Studios has corrected things.
By: Thomas Grapperon | website
Platform: iOS
Reviews: 15 (4 stars)
Overall Reviews: 88 (4.6 stars)
Price: $4.99
In App Purchases: No
The iOS version of the Chord! suite of guitar chord apps is fairly young, but seems to be getting great reviews. The app includes chord references, scales, and even an engine for making your own songsheets.
While the Android app has a nice dark dashboard, the iOS app has light, more “helvetica-ish” interface.
By: Thomas Grapperon | website
Platform: Android
Overall Reviews: 1,893 (4.8 stars)
Price: $3.99
The Chord! app for Android is quite a bit more popular than it’s iOS relative, with over 10k downloads, and 1893 reviews at 4.8 stars.
The paid version of the Chord! app still provides an index of chords and scales. But this version has 400 scales, instead of only 5 in the free version, as well as 8 tunings, reverse chord and scale search, and a custom tunings database.
By: Chris Ladd | website
Platform: iOS
Reviews: 66 (4.5 stars)
Overall Reviews: 2182 (4 stars)
Price: Free
In App Purchases: Yes
Geared towards beginner to intermediate guitarists, ChordBank has a large chord library and tuning. Any type of student should find what they need from the array of photos, audio samples, charts, and graphs.
Requires $3.99 In-App purchases to get past basic major and minor chords to advanced chord shapes.
I would like to suggest Guitar Gravitas as well.
http://www.guitargravitas.com/
for Scales reference on Android I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taurajo.guitarscales&hl=en
it is stupidly easy to use, the rest just gave me headache