Guitar practice apps and your microphone

What each one says

Every source is linked below, with the date we read it. Anything here may have changed since.

How to read "they don't say"

Three of the five apps say nothing at all about your microphone, and two of those three are the same company's. We are not catching anyone out here, so it is worth being careful about what the silence means.

Google's rules for the data form are the useful part here. An app only has to declare data it collects, and Google's own guidance says data "only processed locally on the user's device and not sent off device does not need to be disclosed". So an app that leaves the audio row blank is more likely to be one that keeps the sound on your phone than one that is hiding something. It is a hint in their favour, not a promise.

What silence does mean is that you have no promise to hold them to. If they changed their minds next month, no published line would have to change. Two of these companies have made no commitment either way, and one of them last touched the document ten years ago.

The two that do declare audio deserve the opposite point made just as plainly: they told you. A filled-in audio row is a company writing down what it does.

What we read, app by app

Yousician and GuitarTuna

Yousician listens: their App Store listing sells "real-time feedback that listens as you play". Their privacy notice, last edited 2 October 2023, covers "our online music learning apps" and "our instrument tuning apps" together, so it covers GuitarTuna too. It never mentions a microphone, audio, or a recording. The Google Play data forms for both apps declare plenty of other things, including device identifiers shared for advertising, and no audio at all.

The JustinGuitar app

The app counts your one-minute chord changes through the mic, and it has a tuner. Musopia's policy for it is dated November 2016 and says nothing about audio. Their Play form declares no audio and says the app shares no data with other companies at all, which is the strongest sharing answer on this page. We wrote more about the app itself in our comparison with it.

Simply Guitar

Their listing describes live feedback that recognises what you are playing. Simply's privacy policy, last updated 14 July 2022, lists among the content it collects "sample audio recordings for quality assurance and improving acoustic recognition experience". Their Play form matches it: voice or sound recordings, collected, marked optional, for app functionality and analytics, and not shared with anyone else.

Fender Play

The App Store listing credits "cutting-edge listening technology by MatchMySound" for assessing your playing, which is a second company in the loop. Fender's Play data form is the only one here that puts voice or sound recordings under both headings: collected, and shared with other companies, in each case for app functionality and analytics.

Fender's own privacy policy, updated 1 July 2026, does describe audio going to outside AI providers, but that passage is about Fender Studio, a different product. We are not putting that on Fender Play, and neither should anyone quoting this page.

Strumhold's answer

Strumhold listens to score your playing, and the sound never leaves your device. It does keep some of it, and that is deliberate: when a drill finishes you get the recording, so you can hear what you actually played instead of taking a number's word for it, and check any score you disagree with. Old ones clear themselves out unless you pin the ones you want.

Those recordings are yours in the plainest sense. They sit in your browser on that device, they never sync anywhere, and we hold no copy of a single one of them.

The rest of it, so the row above is not the whole story:

• Your practice history sits on your device. There is no account unless you pay for one, and you can export the lot to a file whenever you like.
• Sync, if you buy it, backs up your drills and practice events to our servers. Never audio.
• Diagnosis, the paid feature that works out which change is costing you, runs on your device where the history already is. We work nothing out about your playing on our servers.
• No analytics scripts, no tracking cookies, no advertising identifiers, on the app or on this site. Once a day we ask our host how many times each page was opened, and write down the number.
• Like any site, we are delivered by a host that sees ordinary web requests, and the app asks our server two questions when it opens: what its settings are, and whether this browser is signed in. Neither carries anything about your playing.

All of that is written out on our privacy page, which is where to hold us to it.

How to check any app yourself

This took about an hour, and none of it needs anything you don't have:

• Open the app's Google Play listing and click Data safety. Look for an Audio heading, under both Data shared and Data collected, and expand it to see what the developer says it is for.
• Open the privacy policy and search the page for "audio", "microphone", "voice" and "recording". Note the date at the top while you are there.
• On the App Store, the App Privacy panel is coarser, but the developer's own description often names the technology doing the listening.
• If it still isn't clear, write to their support and ask whether the audio leaves the device. An answer in writing beats an inference.

What this page can't tell you

We read documents. We did not put any of these apps behind a proxy and watch what they sent, so everything above is what each company says about itself, and a data form is a declaration rather than proof. Companies also change their apps and their policies, so check the dates and check them again if it matters to you.

We are not neutral either. We make one of these, and it is the one whose answer we like. The way to use this page is to click the links and read the sources rather than take our word for any of it.

If what you want is a chord change drill that scores your playing without any of it going anywhere, the chord change test runs in this browser: pick two chords, pick a tempo, and strum.

Open the app Free to start, no account needed