Learn songs on guitar. Play. It checks.
Open any guitar score and read it the way it sounds — a note's width on the page is the time it takes to play it. Connect a guitar and PlayCheck listens while you play, grades every note, and tells you what you got wrong.
What it looks like
Score and proportional tablature
A graded note
Fretboard and chord diagrams
Song library
Scores
Open any score. Read it as it sounds.
Guitar Pro, MusicXML, Capella and AlphaTex files go straight in — drag one onto the window, pick several at once, or open one from your phone. What comes back is not a printout of the tab.
Time is space
One scale governs the whole song: horizontal width equals duration. Fast notes sit close together and a held note stretches out. You can see where a piece breathes before you play any of it, and the cursor never changes speed when the tempo does.
Every marking the file carried
Bends with their release curves, slides and hammer-ons, vibrato and wide vibrato, pick slides, all six harmonic types, ghost notes, naturals, ties, tuplets, repeats and voltas, tempo and section markers — drawn where they fall in the music, not where the source program put them.
Whole songs, every track
No eight-bar limit. Multi-track scores load in full, with a track selector and solo so you can isolate the part you are learning. Repeats can run as written, or expand linearly so each pass through is graded separately.
Chords, worked out
Chord names above the staff and a diagram bank beside the score, at a size and colour you choose. Where the file names no chords, PlayCheck suggests them. Where it gives no fingering, barres are worked out from the notes themselves.
Lyrics, already lined up
Lyrics stored inside a score are extracted on import and placed under the notes at the moment each syllable is sung. Resize them, recolour them, or edit the words in place.
Your own notes under the score
Write reminders against any bar — a fingering, a shift, what to do differently next time. They sit in the score, are yours alone, and travel with the file when you back them up.
Live feedback
Find out what your playing is actually doing.
With a MIDI connection to your instrument, PlayCheck hears each note as you play it. The point is not that it can hear you — it is what it tells you back.
Judged as you play
Every note is marked the moment you hit it: on the beat, early, late, or missed. A verdict rides the playhead so you can feel it without looking away from your hands, and every mark stays on the score to read afterwards.
Timing you can tighten
Set how forgiving the timing window is. Tighten it and grading gets strict; loosen it and you can practise through a rush. A perfect band sits inside the window, so there is always a way to tell genuinely on it from nearly.
Chords graded as one movement
A three-note chord is not three separate scores — it counts as the single thing it is. Strum direction is graded too, against what the file notates, so picking the shape right but brushing it backwards is not the same as playing it.
The score waits for you
In Wait mode the music stops the instant you miss and holds there until you play the right note, then carries on from there. You cannot lose your place and end up three bars behind trying to catch up.
Tempo that follows you
Auto Ramp adds five percent every clean lap. Miss a note and the tempo holds where it was. The speed only ever goes up when you have earned it, and you can watch it climb.
The neck, and a warning when something is off
On an instrument that reports finger position, each note shows the fret, string and finger to use, and held shapes light up as they sound. If your capo or tuning does not match what the song expects, PlayCheck says so instead of quietly grading you against the wrong frets.
Practice
Practise the part that needs it.
Every pass through a track produces a report written in sentences, with the numbers behind them — and every weak spot in it is one tap from becoming a loop.
A report that talks
"You got 87% of the notes. Of the ones you hit, 61% were on the beat — focus on bars 12 to 14." It names the actual failure rather than the score: hammer-ons missed more often than picked notes, slides landing short, chord changes rushed, strum direction reversed.
Accuracy by bar
A heatmap of the whole track. Click the bar you fumbled and it becomes your practice loop, with the count-in already set up.
Timing spread and drift
Two charts: how tightly you hit the beat, and how your timing slides across the song as it goes on. Chord changes are flagged, so you can drill the transitions rather than the notes around them.
Personal best, per track
Your best clean run at speed is recorded for each song and shown next to the last one. Progress is a number you can watch move, per song, not a vague feeling.
Loops, tuner, count-in
Drag-select any bar range to loop it, with a one-bar count-in on every pass. The tuner detects which string you are on and reads in cents. A metronome sits behind all of it, and the app owns the count-in so it never drifts.
Material to practise
A chord trainer with Play, Train and Test modes — Test hides the shape and asks for the name. Or generate your own: scale patterns, 22 strumming patterns, fingerpicking recipes, and chord progressions including 12-bar blues and a CAGED tour. Then play along with what it wrote.
Library
Your songs, organised.
Everything you import lives in one searchable list, stored on the device that imported it. Nothing is uploaded.
Import from anywhere
Drag files onto the window, select a batch at once, or open one from the phone's share sheet. Guitar Pro 3 through 8, MusicXML, Capella and AlphaTex all go in, and a failed import tells you which file and why.
Search, sort, edit
Full-text search across every song you have imported, a filter for the ones you starred, sorting by title, artist or album, and inline editing when a file got its metadata wrong.
Share a library, or subscribe to one
PlayCheck finds libraries announced on your network on its own, or you paste a link to one hosted anywhere on the internet. Opening a song from one downloads it, so it plays from your device like everything else. Turn on sharing and your own library is available to other machines.
Download
Get PlayCheck Guitar
The desktop build installs like any other app and needs no installer options. Both versions are the same build.
macOS
Universal disk image. Open it, drag PlayCheck Guitar into your Applications folder, and launch.
Version 0.1.0 · 64 MB
Windows
Standard installer. It asks to add a firewall rule the first time it runs so it can find Bluetooth instruments on your network.
Version 0.1.0 · 58 MB
iOS and iPadOS
The same scoring, coaching and library, built for landscape. Open scores straight from the Files app.
Coming soon
Android
Same again, with share-sheet import. If you connect over USB, use a powered hub — phones cannot always supply enough current on their own.
Coming soon
Pricing
What it costs
Reading, playback, the library and every practice tool are free. Live feedback is the paid part.
Free, always
$0
- Proportional tablature, playback and count-in
- Song library, import and remote libraries
- Tuner, metronome, loops, chords and scales
- Session reports
- 4 hours of live feedback, once
Annual subscription
$15 / year
- Unlimited live feedback
- Every note graded as you play it
- Play-Along, and a score that waits for you
- Auto Ramp, chord identification, fretboard position
Your first connection arms four hours of live feedback. It only counts while your instrument is actually connected — close the app for a week and nothing is lost — and it does not come back once it is used up. There is no trial and no card details before you get there.
Live feedback needs a MIDI connection to your instrument — built into the guitar, or added with a pickup. Every other feature here works on any guitar, or on none at all.
Plans, billing, and cancellation: playcheckguitar.com/buy.
Questions
Which score files can it open?
Guitar Pro 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8; MusicXML in .mxl, .musicxml or .xml; Capella .cap and .capx; and AlphaTex .tex. On the desktop you can also double-click a file to open it, or drop one anywhere on the window.
What if a file has no tablature?
PlayCheck coaches from stringed tab, so a file containing only standard notation, or drums, cannot be imported. You get told which file and why rather than a silent failure. Convert it to a tabbed format first.
Do I need a MIDI guitar?
Not for most of it. Opening scores, reading them as they sound, playback, the library, remote libraries, the tuner, the loops, the chord and scale tools and the reports all work on any guitar — or none. Live feedback is the part that needs a MIDI connection to your instrument, either built in or added with a pickup.
What happens when the free connection time runs out?
Your instrument disconnects at the next safe point and live feedback stops. Everything else keeps working, and your library and settings are untouched. Pick it back up whenever you want with the annual subscription.
Is there a free trial?
No trial. The four hours of live feedback is the whole of the free preview — it is not a cut-down version, and it is not on a calendar timer.
Do my songs get uploaded anywhere?
No. Scores, metadata and settings are stored on the device that imported them, and stay there. Remote libraries are read-only and download into your own copy.
Which platforms are supported?
macOS and Windows download directly from this page. iOS and Android are in progress; the store buttons above go live when the listings are up.
Can I use one subscription on a laptop and a phone?
Yes. Sign in with the same account on each device and the subscription follows you. Purchases made on iOS or Google Play are tied to your store account there.
Can I cancel?
Any time, from your store subscription settings or from your billing account. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.