Fender Songs is a new iOS app from the veteran guitar manufacturer which lets you learn the chords to millions of songs on guitar, piano, or the ukulele. The app is available to download now for iPhone with a rotating selection of chords available for free, and you can get access to its full library with a subscription costing $4.99 a month or $41.99 a year.

I had a chance to try out Fender Songs ahead of its release, and I found that the app paired a slick interface with a database of chords that sounded pretty accurate to my ears. However, I also found that the app has its limitations, which means it won’t teach you exactly how to play many of its songs. It’s a great resource for anyone who’s getting to grips with playing their first few chords, but more advanced players might find it frustrating.

“This app’s really aimed at any guitar player who wants to learn how to play songs that they know,” Fender’s chief technology officer Ethan Kaplan told me in an interview. Fender’s aim is to have a library of chords that’s big enough so that you can reliably find a song that you’re already interested in, rather than picking based on which song has the best user-submitted chords on one of the free services available around the web. Look up your favorite single, and you’ll find that the app includes chords for the rest of the album for good measure. 

“People are interested in learning songs that are familiar to them, not what they find by searching Google,” Kaplan says.

The app is organized a lot like a music streaming service, except that once you’ve found a song you want to play along with, you’ll also find its lyrics and chords. You can then scroll through and learn its chords at your own pace, or press play to have the song show you the chords in real time. By default, the app plays an auto-generated bass line and drum track as a backing track, but you can strip this back to just drums or a metronome if you prefer. Meanwhile, if you want to play along with the actual songs, then you’ll need to have an Apple Music subscription. 

Once you’re feeling confident enough, the app then lets you record yourself playing a song using your phone’s front-facing camera while you read the song’s chords off the screen. You can even try to sing along with the lyrics if you’re feeling particularly confident. Any videos you film are saved to your phone’s camera roll. 

In order to build up its database of songs, Fender uses software that automatically transcribes music. It sounds similar to its discontinued Riffstation app that the company used to offer on Mac and PC that would transcribe whichever music you uploaded to it. However, Kaplan said that once the software has done its work, Fender will go in and manually edit the results. Kaplan says this approach lets Fender add more music to the app “by the second,” and can offer new songs almost immediately after they’re released. Fender also says it’s made a deal with Warner Music to make sure that its artists’ music is accurately transcribed.

The fact that these chords are initially generated by software adds an interesting element to Fender Songs, because it means you can play along with music that doesn’t include any guitars at all, like “Royals” by Lorde or “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish. At a time when sales of guitars have declined so much that one of Fender’s main competitors, Gibson, was forced to file for bankruptcy last year, getting fans of non-guitar-based music into playing the guitar could provide a lifeline for Fender’s physical sales.

When I tried using the app to play a couple of songs that I already knew the chords to, I found that the app’s notation perfectly matched what I’d learned previously. It’s certainly a nicer experience than trying to find accurate chords online, and then having to awkwardly scroll through a webpage while you play the song from a separate source.

However, you’ll notice that throughout this article I’ve avoided saying that Fender Songs actually teaches you how to play the songs in its library. That’s because it’s only teaching you the basic chords that make up a song. It doesn’t make any attempt to teach you the individual notes that a guitarist is playing. Chords might be enough for a song like “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” by Green Day, but Fender Songs struggles with anything more complicated.

Take “Creep” by Radiohead as an example. If you play the G, B, C, Cm chord progression that Fender Songs lists, then you’ll certainly end up with something that can be played along with the song. But it’s also absolutely not what guitarist Jonny Greenwood is playing during the song’s verse, when he slowly picks out the individual notes within these chords. For that you’d need full tablature, rather than the simple chords that Fender Songs displays.

When I asked about this, Fender’s Kaplan told me that the company is hard at work on full tablature support, but that at the moment it only plans to bring it to Fender Play, the guitar teaching platform that it launched in 2017. However, while the company would “love” to bring this functionality into Fender Songs, its current focus is just on chords.

Although Fender Songs is technically usable without an Apple Music subscription, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. If you’re not playing along to the real song, then the app gives you the option of playing along to a metronome, an auto-generated drum track, or an auto-generated drum and bass track. Although these backing tracks are the right tempo, their rhythm is often completely wrong, to the extent that they can be distracting. Kaplan admitted that the backing tracks basically amount to a “glorified click track,” rather than an actual backing track.

It would be great to see Fender Songs offer Spotify compatibility in the future, but while Kaplan said that Fender is “continuing to talk to” other music streaming services, he refused to be drawn on when these might be added.

If you’re an existing Apple Music subscriber, then Fender’s latest app is a great resource to find chords to let you play along with music, regardless of whether a song actually uses guitars in the first place. It’s got a slick interface, and a vast and accurate library of chords. Just don’t go in expecting the app to be able to teach you your favorite guitar solo.