Loop the chords.
See what to play over them.
You know the chords. The hard part is the bar in front of you: which scale, which arpeggio, where they sit under your hand. ChordLoop plays your progression and shows you, chord by chord, while it goes round.
Guitar, bass, ukulele and piano 4- to 8-string tunings Works offline Your practice stays on your device
root chord tone what makes the scale sound like itself the rest of the scale
Two minutes
Watch it work
The whole app, driven end to end. Placeholder: the audio drifts out of sync — a fixed recording is on the way.
What it does
Three things, in the order you'd do them
Get the chords in
Tap them from the palette, type the chart line under the grid, paste a progression in, start from one of forty-five, or roll a whole loop off one dial. Bars split into two, three or four chords, and a loop that changes key partway through gets each chord numbered in the key it is actually in.
- Any time signature — and 7/8 counted 3+2+2 is a different tune from 2+2+3, so you choose.
- Comping rhythms and drums that follow the meter, each drawn as one bar of itself — or tap your own in against the loop.
- Walking bass, swing, a count-in, a tempo ramp — and a cross-rhythm that drifts on its own cycle, the way a polyrhythm should.
See what fits
Forty-four scales and modes, grouped by how far each sits from the key. In the key is safe anywhere in the loop. One note outside is the usual amount of colour. Further out is a departure, and it says so.
- Guide tones — the 3rds and 7ths that spell the change, with the move to the next chord drawn on the diagram.
- Chord shapes for your tuning, shells included — and at the piano, shell, rootless and spread voicings.
- Notes coloured by their job — root, chord tone, the note that makes the scale sound like itself, and the rest.
- Sixteen mode vamps, all on one root, so you hear what actually changes between Dorian and Phrygian.
Get it under your hands
You run a scale in one shape, not across the whole neck. So the board reduces to a fingering: three notes per string, four, the uneven ones, or a position box you stay inside. Rolls and slides come out of the frets themselves.
- Sequences over the shape — up in 3s, in 4s, in 3rds, broken 3rds, pedalling the root — lighting up on the diagram as they sound.
- Played against the chord, so you can tell in two seconds whether that ♭9 is colour or a wrong note.
- A position pinned per chord — moving between two of them is the exercise.
Practising, not just playing
The parts you only want once you sit down
Everything here came out of using it.
Loop two bars of eight
The bar giving you trouble is rarely the whole tune. Set a range and drill it. The rest dims instead of vanishing — it is still the tune.
Play along
Through a microphone or MIDI. The heat map shows which notes of the scale you actually used, measured against an even spread — so a pentatonic does not just report five notes at a fifth each.
Ear training
Hides the chart, the numerals, the scales and the shapes, and turns the bars into blanks. Marking is by sound, so CM7, C∆7 and Cmaj7 all heard the same thing.
Gap click
The metronome drops out for a few bars and you find out whether the time was yours or its. Counted in bars played, so it walks around a loop whose length does not divide it.
A tuner for your tuning
Not a chromatic tuner. It reads every string of whatever is on the fretboard — six, seven or eight, a preset or one typed in by hand — and names each one the way that tuning spells it, so a seven-string down a half step reads B♭1 E♭2 A♭2.
A practice log
Counts time the loop was actually running rather than time the tab was open, and leads with what has gone quiet rather than with a total.
And the theory behind it
Two views that answer "why", not just "what"
The circle of fifths, with the chords that lead between the keys
Twelve keys twice over, major outside and relative minor inside, with the selected key's tonic and leading-tone °7 in the middle. Beside the seven diatonic chords sit the passing diminished sevenths and the augmented chords that move between them — because a circle showing only the diatonic seven shows harmony as a wheel nothing ever leaves. Press any of them to hear it, or load a progression straight into the practice loop.
Every mode of every family, on your instrument
The modes of the major scale, harmonic major, harmonic minor and melodic minor, the pentatonics, the blues scales, the symmetric ones and a shelf of exotic scales — each with the chord it implies, what makes it sound like itself, and where it lies on the neck or the keys. Every note is spelled from the degree it occupies, so a minor 3rd above C is E♭ and never D♯.
Where it runs
Built for the room you actually practise in
A browser tab that behaves like an app
Rehearsal rooms are basements and trains are tunnels, so ChordLoop caches itself on the first visit and the instruments as you play them — or all of them at once, deliberately, before you go somewhere with no signal. Add it to a phone or tablet home screen and it opens full-screen from its own icon, with nothing to download and nothing to update by hand.
Nothing leaves your device
No account, no server, no analytics. Your loops, your practice log and your settings live in your browser's own storage — and because that means clearing site data takes the lot, all of it exports to a file you keep.
A loop travels as a link
The whole loop — chords, tempo, meter, feel and scale — fits in the URL, so sharing one needs no account and no upload. It rides in the fragment, which means it never reaches anybody's access log.
Legible where you need it
A light theme for a stand outdoors, bigger diagram text for a stand at arm's length, and a colour-blind-safe palette where each role also carries a mark of its own — because a palette that is only colour has moved the problem, not solved it.
It remembers where you were
The loop you had open comes back when you do, without saving it first. Nobody saves a loop they are still working out.
What it costs
Free to play. $12.99 once to be listened to.
The free half is everything on this page so far, and it is not a trial: the loop builder, the band, all 44 scales, every diagram, every tuning and the tuner. No account, no card, no clock counting down on any of it.
What costs money is the app working on you rather than for you — hearing what you played over the chords, drilling a shape up to speed, remembering months of practice, and letting you carry the loop into a DAW. One payment, once. No subscription, no expiry.
Free
$0 forever
No account. Nothing to cancel.
- The loop builder — any meter, any tempo, odd and additive bars
- The backing band — comping rhythms, drums, walking bass, swing, cross-rhythms
- All 44 scales, grouped by how far from the key they sit
- The fretboard and piano diagrams, chord by chord as it plays
- Chord shapes and voicings, guide tones and the line between them
- Run patterns and sequences, at the tempo you set
- Guitar, bass, ukulele and piano · all 35 tunings, 4 to 8 strings · the tuner
- Ear training, the circle of fifths, and 45 preset progressions
- Five saved loops · share a loop as a link · works offline · installs to the home screen
Practice
$8.99 $12.99 one payment
Everything in Free, and:
- It listens back — play along by microphone or MIDI and every note is marked against the chord going past, then the heat map shows which notes of the scale you have been avoiding. Free measures for three minutes a session.
- Drill a run — any shape round and round to a click while the tempo climbs. The run itself is free; playing it forty times at rising speed is the paid part.
- Your whole practice history rather than the last seven days — what you played, when, and what has gone quiet.
- Take the loop with you — MIDI for a DAW, chords, bass and drums on their own tracks; WAV for a phone with no signal; the chart as an image for the music stand.
- Save as many loops as you like.
Launch price until 30 November 2026
Open ChordLoop → Start free · pay when you want it listening back
Questions
Before you open it
Do I need an account?
No, and there is no way to make one. ChordLoop has no server: everything it knows about you is in your own browser, and it works the same whether you have ever visited before or not.
What is free, exactly?
Building loops, playing them back with the band, and seeing what to play over each chord — the whole of what this page describes, for as long as you want, with no account and no card. That includes all 44 scales, every tuning, the chord shapes and voicings, the guide-tone line, the walking bass, the run patterns and their sequences, ear training and the tuner. None of it is a trial.
Four things are the one payment of $12.99, currently $8.99: the app listening back to you through a microphone or MIDI (free measures for three minutes a session), drilling a run to a click with the tempo climbing, your practice history past the last seven days, and export to MIDI, WAV or a printed chart. Saving more than five named loops is on that side too. There is no subscription and no expiry: the app has no server to bill you from.
Two things are never locked, whatever you have paid: sending a loop to somebody as a link, and backing up or restoring your own loops and practice history.
What does it do with my microphone?
It listens for pitch, in your browser, and nothing else. Audio is analysed frame by frame on your device and never recorded, uploaded or kept — the app has nowhere to send it. The microphone is only ever on while you have started the tuner or the play-along, and browsers ask your permission first.
Guitar or piano?
Both, and they are separate choices: what the loop is played on and which diagram is drawn. You can have a piano sound with a fretboard in front of you, or the other way round.
Bass and ukulele too. The fretboard covers anything from four to eight strings with thirty-five preset tunings — including a re-entrant ukulele, where the fourth string sounds above the third — and any tuning at all typed in by hand. The shapes and the run patterns are computed from the tuning, so they are right on a seven-string in drop A as readily as on a uke.
Will it work on my phone?
Yes. It is built to be used on a stand: the layout folds down to one column, the diagrams scale, and it can be installed to the home screen and opened without a network.
Can I get my loops out?
Any loop copies out as a line of chart text or a link, the loop plays out as a WAV file, and everything the app holds — saved loops, the practice log and your settings — backs up to a single file. A restore merges rather than replacing, so restoring a backup on a browser you have been practising in keeps that practice too.
Is there an Android or iOS app?
The web app is the app: it installs to the home screen on both, runs full-screen and works offline. A Play Store listing is on the way for Android, and it will be the same app in a different wrapper, at the same price.