See the Whole Neck
Pick a key and the fretboard lights up with the notes that belong in it, coloured by scale degree. Tap any note to hear it, and see any chord as a real shape anywhere on the neck.
iPhone & iPad · FreeLearn Guitar. See the Fretboard. Compose.
A guitar studio for iPhone and iPad. Jam over any key on a fretboard that actually sounds like a guitar, build progressions, write full tabs, and drill it all until it sticks.
Inside the app
So many ways to spend another hour with the guitar
* Screenshots taken on iPad. Tap one to see full-size gallery.
A Neck You Can Play
A full-screen guitar under your fingers. Hold any chord, play it in any neck position or with any strum and picking pattern, slide diagonally to catch only the notes of the chord, and solo over the progression — bends and slides included — with the CAGED shapes lit under your hand.
Analyse What You Played
Plug in through an audio interface and play a tab. Timing, notes, palm mutes, slides and bends are all read back and scored. No AI, no cloud — the analysis runs on the device and nothing is recorded or uploaded.
Tab Editor Built for Touch
Write full songs with a fretboard you play into rather than a keyboard you type on. Hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, palm mutes, triplets — all a tap away.
Analyze song harmony
Allows to see and understand what is going on in the whole song or song section from the harmony perspective. Not just the key, but progressions in a song, chords and theor meaning, arpeggios, borrowed notes or changed scales.
Print tabs
Print or share PDF of your tabs and notations, with selection of tracks, with or without scoring.
Build Progressions
Line up the chords of your key, reorder them by dragging, and add voicings of your own. Loop the result and play along — or save it to your library and reuse it in a song.
Strums & Fingerpicking
Dozens of strum and fingerpicking patterns, from ballad to funk, with real swing and accents rather than a flat grid. Capture your own patterns straight from what you played.
Drills Made to Order
Ask for an exercise and get one: pick a key and a level from 1 to 10, and the app writes scales and picking, legato, chord tones, sweep picking or a melodic study — with a band behind it if you want one. What comes out is a real tab, so you can loop it, play it back and edit it like any song.
Guided Lessons
A step-by-step course through the instrument — shape diagrams, audio you can play back, and exercises to work through. Your progress is tracked module by module, and the whole course is free.
Practice Games
Timed trainers for finding notes, hearing intervals, spotting scale degrees and running arpeggios — the same ideas the lessons teach, drilled until they are reflex.
Pattern Library
A shelf of ready-made progressions, arpeggios and strum patterns. Preview any of them, send a progression to the jam screen, or drop one straight into a tab and edit it.
Metronome & Drums
A metronome with a screen of its own: tap tempo, count-in, a tempo that steps up as you drill, and a click that drops out for a few bars so you hold the time yourself. Or practise to a real drum groove in 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4 or 7/8.
Chromatic Tuner
Tune by ear through the microphone, in standard tuning or whichever alternate tuning you picked. It names any note it hears, so it works for a capo or a string tuned somewhere unusual.
Real Recorded Guitar
Hand-recorded samples, string by string, with palm-muted and hard-picked variants — not synthesised tones. Clean, overdrive and distortion, each voiced so chords stay clear.
Your Key, Your Tuning, Your Time
One panel sets the terms and the rest of the app follows: the key and scale you are working in, any of thirteen tunings from Drop D to Open C, and nine time signatures from 2/4 to 12/8. In a song the chord lane names the harmony bar by bar, a count-in clicks you in before the first note, and a looped section can climb a few BPM each pass until you are playing it up to speed.
A Whole Band, Not Just a Guitar
Write more than one part: a drum track under the guitar, and piano, bass, violin, cello, flute, sax or trumpet over it — each on its own track, switched between as you write. Select a run of bars and loop just that section while you practise it.
Free & Pro
The free version doesn't limit usage
Not forcing to go to Pro, almost everything is available in the free version. Pro adds a couple of conveniences — and it's the way to support author.
Free
No account required.
- Fretboard — all keys, scales, chords, and tunings
- Ride - full-screen playable neck
- Full tab and notation editor, multitrack and printing
- Progressions, strums and fingerpicking patterns
- Metronome, tuner, drum grooves, time signatures
- Play analysis
- Harmony analysis of a song, its sections or separate bars
- The entire lesson course and every practice game
- Up to three saved songs
Fretride Pro
Monthly or yearly. Cancel anytime.
- Unlimited saved songs
- Cloud sync across devices
- Capture your own arpeggio and strum patterns
- More guitar tones: overdrive and distortion
- Sound banks for midi instruments (drums, piano, etc.)
Fretride is built by one person. A subscription isn't how you unlock the app — it's the way to support future development.
Download the app
One ride through the app tells you more than any feature list above ever will — so pick it up and hear it for yourself. Would be nice to hear what worked and what didn't: at fretride@icloud.com, and your feedback is what shapes the next version. Let's build Fretride together.
