Songwriting, scales & music theory — built around the circle of fifths.
Tonaly helps you write songs, master scales, and finally make sense of music theory. Visual, interactive, and built for guitarists, pianists, producers, and every musician in between.
** #1 Music App in over 20 countries **
** Loved by 250.000+ musicians **
WRITE SONGS THAT WORK
Pick chords from the circle of fifths and combine them into songs that sound great. See how chords connect, change keys instantly, and export your ideas as MIDI to Ableton, Logic, or GarageBand.
LEARN SCALES VISUALLY
Master scales on guitar, piano, bass, ukulele, violin, viola, or cello — with left-hand mode. From major and minor to Dorian, Mixolydian, and 80+ additional scales.
UNDERSTAND MUSIC THEORY
See how keys, chords, and scales connect — instead of memorizing rules. Roman numerals, Nashville numbers, intervals, and chord structures, all explained visually.
FOR EVERY MUSICIAN
Whether you're starting out, finishing your first song, or teaching students — Tonaly adapts to your level and instrument.
KEY FEATURES
- Interactive circle of fifths
- 80+ scales and modes
- 7 instruments with multiple tunings
- MIDI and PDF leadsheet export
- Song templates (Pop, Jazz, Blues & more)
- Time signatures: 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 7/8, 5/8
- Transposed playback for Bb and Eb instruments
- Color themes including a color blind theme
- German note names (H/B)
- iCloud sync
- Left-hand mode
START FREE
Tonaly offers a free trial – cancel anytime.
Privacy Policy: https://tonaly.app/privacy/app
Terms of Service: https://tonaly.app/legal/terms-of-service
Hats off to the developer(s). This app is so well thought out and designed. I’m absolutely in love with it. A great tool for learning, songwriting, and deconstructing popular songs for making your own arrangements. One thing I’d really like to see added is more in depth archive options when you save songs. I’m in the process of building out covers I know and would love the ability to tag songs to a genre, artists, etc. and be able to type in a search bar to jump right to it. It would also be nice to be able to add custom text fields above song parts. If I could just type in the first line of lyrics for versus, choruses, so on that’d be awesome. Then this app will be dang near perfect! 🤙 There are options to export out to PDF lead sheets so you could still use this app as a tool for building a good archive system yourself, but the app design and functionality is so beautiful I don’t wanna leave it.
Developer Response
Awesome! Thanks for your review! I'll keep your suggestions in the back of my head for future updates! Stay tuned!
Pretty good
BBP PC
Certainly is easier to to just play the piano with one thumb, if you understand music theory enough it’s pretty exciting to do all this very easily. I like the features that structure the song writing easily, even down to the small things like being able to see the mini piano as the chords play. Which brings me to something I would love to see in the future (I have searched to see if this is a feature, I haven’t found anything about it). So sometimes I’ll play a chord once, for example, Dmaj7/F#, one time, play something else and back to Dmaj7/F# again but the second time the F# is an octave above from the first one. I would like to be able to control the octave of the bass notes as well. I would also like to see if we can play a chord on the piano that shows when sideways and get it to appear as a chord, and implement it into the song, in case we wanted a more spread out chord per se. I would like to see us be able to write melodies in these chord progressions with this app. I was hoping it would do that since it was the price it is, although its pretty good for its price now, it would really make it better if it had the ability to write melodies with these chord progressions.Despite all of that I do believe this app is brilliant with its features on not only being able to exercise your knowledge in music theory by creating beautiful chord progressions, but also teach music theory to beginners while also giving both beginners and advanced users inspiration for creating something new, and giving ideas when we hit a creative block. Overall, great app, could be better but good enough.
Developer Response
Thank you for your review! One of he next bigger updates will bring own inversions and octaves for chords. The app creates automated inversions and fits that into an octave range. so it may apparent that the second time it plays the chords back it moved up to another octave due to creating inversions. Thank you for your feedback! I'll keep it in mind for upcoming updates!
Fun and super helpful for writing songs!
wckreation
Great little app, very helpful for composing and actually hearing chord progressions back for those who don't have relative and perfect pitch. The only thing is that I would love for more customizations of the chords, namely inversions (even in combination with four note chords) and different rhythms that aren't 4/4. Right now, the root of the chord is always on the bottom. Inversions add a different color to the chord and are very widely used in songs and compositions. Some chords in the context of a certain progression just aren't the same sound without inversions. As for rhythms, it would be helpful for more control over how many bars a progression is and how many beats are in a bar. Right now, it's always 4 beats to a bar. Either 4 or 8 bars. I don't think adding different time signatures would be incredibly difficult nor adding custom length of bars any amount between (2-8). Also, adding chord changes within a bar would be awesome. That would add more complexity, sure, but the app for have so much value for making fully realized chord progressions for a song or composition. Other than those things, a solid app with lots of potential for improvement. I'm sure the inversions and rhythms features can be included in a future update.
Developer Response
Hey wckreation, thank you for your detailed feedback! The latest update of the app includes a more flexible song structure, as well as different time signatures! Enjoy!
Pretty confusing so far READ BEFORE YOU BUY
Captain_Brandy
Not happy there was no trial before purchase, but I guess it makes sense from a business standpoint. I would not have purchased. I’m always looking for helpful tools and this will not be one. You can jam with the chords under “scales” but you can’t record there. In fact, I don’t see a way to record even in “songwriting” . Instead, you need to tap the first measure and select a note, tap the next measure and select a note and so on. If you don’t tap the next measure you just keep changing the note for the first measure. I was hoping for an intuitive app for songwriting that exports midi, which this certainly is not. When I write a song, I don’t strum one chord once per measure, so this midi info is useless. I’ll try downloading this onto an iPad to see if it works any better, but I don’t have high hopes with no sign of a metronome on iPhone. The “instructions” online for this app are just videos online of the developer playing with an older version of the app. If your charging money I think it’s part of the job to record new videos to match the app that is currently sold to consumers. Why aren’t the “scales” automatically matched to the “songwriting” key?
Improved localizations for all languages. Added full support for Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Turkish, Korean and Portuguese.
Version 3.7.8
The developer, Christian Hengst Daniels, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Used to Track You
The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:
Identifiers
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
Purchases
Location
Identifiers
Usage Data
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Diagnostics
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Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
