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. For that you’d need full tablature, rather than the simple chords that Fender Songs displays. 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. 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. 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. It doesn’t make any attempt to teach you the individual notes that a guitarist is playing. That’s because it’s only teaching you the basic chords that make up a song.
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. The chords sounded accurate, but Fender Songs isn’t going to be teaching you guitar solos anytime soon 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. 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. 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.
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. Fender also says it’s made a deal with Warner Music to make sure that its artists’ music is accurately transcribed. 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. However, Kaplan said that once the software has done its work, Fender will go in and manually edit the results.
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. In order to build up its database of songs, Fender uses software that automatically transcribes music.
There are even chords available for songs that don’t have guitars in them Any videos you film are saved to your phone’s camera roll. You can even try to sing along with the lyrics if you’re feeling particularly confident. 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. Meanwhile, if you want to play along with the actual songs, then you’ll need to have an Apple Music subscription. 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. 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. 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. “People are interested in learning songs that are familiar to them, not what they find by searching Google,” Kaplan says. Look up your favorite single, and you’ll find that the app includes chords for the rest of the album for good measure.
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. “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. “People are interested in learning songs that are familiar to them, not what they find by searching Google”