Chord Detection
Get the chords for any song, in seconds
The best musicians train their ears by learning the songs they love. Capo analyzes any song and shows you its chords in seconds—so you can start playing, instead of searching for a chart that might not match your recording.
Learn more and try the Free Edition
Online Tabs vs. Capo
Tailored to your recording
Capo doesn't pull chords from a catalog. It finds the chords in whatever file you give it—the live version, the demo, the B-side that nobody bothered to chart.
Beyond the basic chords
Capo recognizes 168 different chord types, plus inversions. An Am7 comes back as
an Am7, and a D/F# as a D/F#. Want more spice? Write in your own chords like
Em7b9 or Dmaj7#5/F#.
Build independence, and ears
Capo gets you started with chords, but that's only half the battle. By working out the dynamics, the rhythm, and voicings in the song yourself, your ear gets stronger with every song.
“Whether I go to learn a song myself or teach someone how to play a song, I bring it up in Capo.”Read about Capo's use in Education ›
However you play
Capo gets you most of the way there in seconds. Everything after that is open for tweaks. This flexibility is why it works for a jazz guitarist, a piano teacher, and a left-handed banjo player at the same time.
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Edit chords to taste
Use the Chord Chooser to take one of the likely matches, enter any chord by name, or pick a different voicing. Add chords the detection missed, remove ones you do not need, and apply a correction to every matching chord in the song at once.
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For your instrument
Guitar, piano, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, or 4–6 string bass—pick one and its tuning, and the diagrams update immediately. Set a virtual capo, and every chord re-voices to the shape you'd actually play.
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Chords how you want to see them
Names, fretboard diagrams, or piano keys. Flipped around for left-handed players. Drawn larger or smaller, so they're readable from wherever you have the screen propped up.
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Match your singing range
Transpose the song and every chord follows automatically. For a recording that sits between keys, fine-tune the pitch in cents until it lands.
Apple Design Award
Mac Developer Showcase
Winner 2011
Best of Mac App Store
Best Apps of the Year
2011
iMore Best of 2014 Award
Audio App of the Year
2014
Frequently asked
Does Capo work with songs from Spotify or Apple Music?
No. Streaming tracks are protected by DRM, preventing apps like Capo from analyzing the music.
Capo works on audio files you own—MP3, WAV, AIFF, M4A, FLAC, and DRM-free purchases from iTunes, Bandcamp, or Qobuz. Of course, you can also use files ripped from your CD collection.
On the iPhone and iPad, Capo makes it easy to buy a DRM-free copy from iTunes. On the Mac you can right-click a song in the Music app and choose "Show in iTunes Store".
How accurate is Capo's chord detection?
For most songs it's accurate enough that you're touching up a chart, not building one from scratch. On some songs it'll struggle—there's weak harmonic information, or the recording is badly out of tune. But every chord is fully editable, so it only takes a few seconds to make corrections, change a voicing, or simplify an extension.
No chord detection engine can be perfect, and you should be wary of apps or
services that claim otherwise. For starters, perfection is in the eye of the
musician: if the whole band (including the singer) forms a Cmaj7 chord, one
guitarist might want to play a C/E as an inverted triad, and a jazz pianist
might prefer a Cmaj11 for a cocktail cover. Nobody's wrong here.
Do I have to pay to get the chords?
Absolutely not. The Free Edition gives you full access to try Capo's on-device chord detection engine before you pay us a dime—you just can't save your edits to chords and beats, export anything, or make a lead sheet on the Mac.
By full access, we mean full—we don't cut off the results before the chorus kicks in, and we're not limiting you to 14 days of access. The Free Edition has no calendar limit, and you can learn as many songs as you'd like with it before you decide to make the leap.
Does chord detection need an internet connection?
No. Everything runs locally on your Mac, iPhone or iPad—the fully trained neural network ships with the app.
That's why it works in a practice room with no signal, and why there's no risk of your library landing in anybody else's data center.
Does Capo show what key the song is in?
Yes. Capo estimates the song's key and shows it in the toolbar on the Mac, or in the KEY control strip on iPhone and iPad.
If it reads a song as C major when your ear says A minor, you can override it— Notes › Change Song Key… on the Mac, or Change Song Key from the menu at the top right of the song view on iOS.
What happens to the chords when I set a virtual capo?
When you choose a fret for the capo, Capo adjusts the chords—and the tablature display on macOS—accordingly. Additionally, when you select a chord to hear audible feedback, Capo will play the capo-adjusted chord.
For example, if the song calls for a G chord and you set the capo to the 3rd fret, you would play an open E chord to sound a G. So Capo shows you an E chord there, and plays the capo-adjusted G for the audible feedback.
Besides guitar, what instruments can Capo display chords for?
Capo's chord boxes show fretboard diagrams for guitar, ukulele, banjo, mandolin, and 4–6 string bass. And for each instrument, there are a number of tunings to choose from—far too many to list here. We recommend that you check out the Free Edition to see what we have, and get in touch if you can't find what you're looking for.
Capo also shows simplified, compact chord diagrams for piano. Specifically, all the voices of a chord are displayed in an octave, with the bass note shown more prominently than the rest. From there, you can build your own voicing on the keyboard however you like.
But it really doesn't matter what instrument you play: chords are chords, and Capo can be configured to show only their names if you don't need pictures.
Start with any song
