Studio with a teacher. Got a code from your music teacher? Settings → Studio with a teacher → type it with your first name, and this week's loop from your teacher sits at the top of Build. Every practice run reports back to them: the loop, how many passes, the tempo you reached. No code yet? Tap Invite your teacher: they sign up free and you join their studio automatically. Teachers: paste your key once and every saved idea gets a Send to students button. Practice mode: a new "Again at this speed" button keeps the next pass at the current tempo instead of stepping up.

Chord charts are now real sheet music. Every chart is a lead sheet: the key signature, one bar per chord, the chord symbol above and the roman numeral below, written on a piano grand staff. Playing the loop on guitar, Rhodes, strings or another instrument? The chart adds that instrument's own staff on top with the exact notes ChordLoop plays, so a student can read the part straight off the page.

Made for iPad and iPhone Duo. ChordLoop now fills the whole iPad screen. Upright, the chord pads sit beside your loop and its sound. Turn the iPad sideways and the studio spreads into three columns: pads, loop and sound, all in view at once. On iPhone Duo, open it up for the bigger layout, and turn it sideways for the side-by-side studio. On iPhone it looks and plays exactly as before.

Small update: shared progressions now link straight to ChordLoop on the App Store, so whoever you send one to can open it in a tap. Want to try progressions before you open the app? There's now a free browser version at jonathanscribbles.com/chords, with pages for common progressions in every key.

ChordLoop sounds and plays more like real musicians. • The piano responds to touch. Soft chords now use soft recordings of the grand, and accents use hard ones, so a quiet passage sounds gentle and the downbeat rings out. Rhodes and marimba do the same. • Guitars play real chord shapes. A strummed G is the six strings a guitarist actually plays, with open strings ringing, not a keyboard chord. • A strum sounds like a hand: the classic down, down-up, up-down-up rhythm, with up-strokes catching the top strings and each string stopping when it is struck again. • Everything now plays in a real recorded hall instead of a generated reverb. • The timing breathes the way a band does, drifting a little ahead or behind instead of jittering. Also new: • MIDI export opens the share sheet, like audio export: save to Files, AirDrop it, or open it straight in GarageBand. • Shared progressions include a link, so whoever you send one to can hear it too. Exported files are named after ChordLoop, so they're easy to find. • If ChordLoop helps you write, you may be asked for a rating — only after you've played a few loops or exported something, never when you open the app. Still entirely on your phone, no internet needed.

Fixed: chords were dropping presses on the Build tab. The page was springing back under your finger, so a tap on a chord often became a scroll and never reached the button. The app was reserving space for the notch and the home indicator twice over, which left the front screen permanently scrollable by about an inch with nowhere to go — and that slack was what bounced. The space is now counted once and the bounce is gone. Chords fire on the first press, and the loop is playable again.

Building and hearing are one job, so they are one tab now. The chords and the loop sit on the Build tab together — tap a chord, it lands in the progression, and the way it plays is a scroll below instead of a separate trip. Ideas keeps its own tab. Sound is a menu, not a wall of buttons. You could only ever pick one instrument, so now you pick it the way you pick anything else. New Settings tab: choose the whole colour scheme — four themes, five accents — and find the answers to how things work under Frequently asked questions, instead of having them crowd the screen you are trying to work on. Picking a key is one slim bar across the top. The running commentary under the chord grid is gone. Fixed: the black bars that appeared above and below the app when you scrolled past the top or bottom, and the tempo slider that would only move when you happened to be scrolled to the very end of the page.

A brand-new look — and a much easier app to find your way around ChordLoop is bright now. Sunny cream instead of near-black, big rounded cards, chunky readable type, and chords that pop when you tap them. It is also organised into three simple tabs instead of one long scroll: • Build — pick a key, tap chords, and watch your loop take shape right underneath them. • Sound — the instrument, how the chords play, bass and drums, all in one place. • Ideas — everything you have saved, ready to open, export or delete. Play stays pinned to the bottom of the screen, so it is always one tap away. Export, MIDI, sharing and the sound test now live behind clearly labelled "More" sections, so the screen you start on stays short and calm. Every sound, every feature and every saved idea works exactly as before — this release is all about how it looks and how you get around it.

Per-chord play styles (Pro) Every chord in a progression can now play its own way instead of the whole loop sharing one feel. Tap the style button under any chord and choose Block, Strum, Arpeggio up, Arpeggio down, Arpeggio up-and-down, or Pattern — or leave it following the loop. You hear each style the moment you pick it, the styles are saved with the idea, and exported audio plays exactly what you built. Also in this release: the progression now shows numbered steps, and every control on a step is a full-size button.