Play Along!

A TuneLing teaches you how to play a song. You do not need to read music!

It’s an animated visual presentation, perfectly synchronized to a recording, showing you correct chords, notes, lyrics, annotations, and more. You can customize both the content and the layout of what you see. You can change the speed and/or pitch of the song, use loops (pre-made, or your own), and much, much more.

A TuneLing’s visual content is not “carved in stone”, like a video, because it’s created as you see it. That means that you can change it – even while it’s playing!

TuneLings are always made by skilled musicians, not algorithms or “artificial intelligence”, so they they make musical sense, and they’re accurate.

You need three things to use TuneLings:

1. The (free!) TuneLings App, from this site – click the blue button. (It’s currently available for MacOS computers.)
2. The TuneLing for a song. You get that from the TuneLings Store, which is built into the App.
3. A recording of the song (an audio file). Usually, that will be included with the TuneLing, other times you may provide it yourself.
   
   

The App is very powerful, but very easy to use, and there’s plenty of Help information built into it.

TuneLings can be made for literally almost any stringed, fretted instrument, in any tuning – including ones that don’t yet exist, or custom-built oddities. Capos are supported too!

All currently available TuneLings are made for guitar, and many support ukulele and mandolin as well.

Parts for new instruments can be added to existing TuneLings, and we take requests!

(And yes, we do plan to support keyboards and percussion, as soon as we’re able.)

Sure! If you know how to hold the instrument, and you understand a chord diagram, you’re good to go.

It’s all about developing “muscle memory”. That is, the ability to quickly move your fingers to the correct positions (or “shapes”) to form a chord, and to switch between chord shapes quickly.

A beginner makes rapid progress with a TuneLing, because they’re playing real music, so gratification is immediate. They just slow the recording way down to start, then speed it up, bit by bit, as they develop muscle memory.

Looping (repeating specific sections of a song) helps a lot too. TuneLings usually come with musically useful pre-made loops, and making your own is really easy.

(And yes, TuneLings teach much more than just chords, for you non-beginners!)

No – we love music teachers, and we expect they’ll love TuneLings too, because we increase their income opportunities.

TuneLings can be created by anyone with the knowledge and skill to teach about music, and making a TuneLing is not difficult.

So if you have those skills, please consider becoming a TuneLing author. And remember, the people who make TuneLings get PAID.

Private music teachers can use TuneLings as a learning tool for students they meet with regularly. But of course, many musicians never study with a teacher at all. TuneLings provide a way for those learners to benefit from a teacher’s skill, anywhere, anytime. And those teachers get to connect with students who they otherwise would not reach.

YES — this is very cool — BONUS!!!

The TuneLings App can play audio files in all of the common formats, like MP3, AAC (that’s the iTunes flavor), AIFF, and WAV – even if there’s no TuneLing available for that recording!

Of course, there’s no visual component to the experience when you do that, but the play along features, like independent speed and pitch controls, and looping, will all work. You can even save your loops!

So any musician can use the App as a powerful audio play along tool, for free, no matter what instrument, or what style of music they play.

(You’re welcome! Please tell your friends!)

Right now, you need a MacOS computer (version 10.10 Yosemite or newer) to run the TuneLings App. We plan to bring TuneLings to iOS devices, Android and Windows, at our earliest opportunity.

But we still have something great for non-Mac-users: we sometimes make what we call “Lyric and Chords” videos, and host them on Youtube. These are video mashups – we combine an artist’s existing video with animated chords and lyrics from a TuneLing, blending them into one, in a pretty cool way.

These aren’t interactive, so they’re not nearly as powerful as the App, but you can still play along with the song, and they work on any device, they’re free, and some of them are visually stunning!

(Artists, if you’re interested in adding Lyrics & Chords to your existing videos, contact us!)

You can get to the Youtube playlist of the ones we’ve made so far from this page – check them out!

The TuneLings App is uniquely capable. A few of its advanced features are:

• Independent speed and pitch controls, metronome functions, and looping, for any recording, with or without a TuneLing
• Unlimited number of completely customizable visual display layouts
• Display of chords, notes, lyrics, scales (diatonic and pentatonic), arpeggios, annotations, and artists’ comments
• Easy support for multiple ways to play any song
• Arbitrary combinations of simultaneous instruments
  
  

But rather than list everything a TuneLing can do, we suggest you look at the information under the “Capabilities” menu at the top of this page, or better yet, get the App now!