Strumhold and the JustinGuitar app

What each one is

JustinGuitar prices read from the US App Store on 25 August 2026. See what it costs below.

Both of them listen

The JustinGuitar app hears you. Its one-minute change exercise counts your changes through the microphone, and the tuner works the same way. So listening is not what separates these two.

What separates them is what the listening turns into. The app gives you a count for the minute. Strumhold marks every single change: which chord you were arriving on, whether you got there in time, and whether the chord that sounded was the one you meant.

It also keeps the two directions apart. C to G and G to C are not the same skill. One relocates your whole hand, the other pivots on a finger you already have down, and most players own one of them and not the other. A single score for "C and G" averages away the half that is costing you.

With Pro, Diagnosis goes further. It reads your whole history, names the one change losing you the most, the tempo where it is worst, and the reason it misses: late, early, no strum heard, or the old shape still ringing. Then it hands you the drill for it.

Why the history matters

Learning guitar is months of feeling like nothing is happening. Most people who give up do not give up because it is hard. They give up because they cannot tell whether any of it is working, and after a few weeks of that, the guitar goes back in the case.

So Strumhold keeps everything, in a form you can actually read:

• Every pair carries the fastest tempo you have actually played it clean. It moves up only after you have done it twice, so one lucky run cannot lift it, and it never quietly slides back down while you are away. The app will not show you a number it did not measure.
• How many of the pairs you are working on you have got clean, out of how many there are.
• Your practice by week, as bars going back as far as you have been at it.
• A streak that is hard to break on purpose: miss a day and it holds, and it takes two in a row to reset. It counts days you showed up. It never nags about the ones you didn't.
• Pairs you have not touched in a while come back on their own, at the tempo you last held, to check the change is still there.
• When a change the app told you to work on starts landing more often, it says so out loud.

Justin's website will graph your one-minute-change scores too, if you type them in, and the app counts the changes for you. What differs is where the number comes from and how fine it is. Strumhold's comes out of the playing itself, one change at a time, each direction on its own, at a tempo it knows. That same history is what picks tomorrow's practice.

All of it sits on your device. There is no account to open, and you can export the lot to a file whenever you like.

What it costs

JustinGuitar does not publish a price for the app on their own site. The store page says prices vary with local currency, taxes and sales, and the app is sold through the app stores. On the US App Store on 25 August 2026, Full Access was $8.99 a month or $64.99 a year, with longer bundles listed above that. What you see may differ by country and by whatever sale is running.

Strumhold is free to practice, forever, with no account: the drills, the scoring, your full history, and one jam. Pro is $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year and adds Diagnosis and jamming over a band. Sync, if you want your practice on more than one device, is $2.99 a month.

That is the same money, near enough. Price is not a reason to pick one over the other, and the course on justinguitar.com is free whichever you choose.

Nothing leaves your machine

Strumhold scores the sound inside your browser, and it uploads no audio, for scoring or for anything else. It does keep a recording of every finished drill, on purpose, so you can hear what you actually played, and that recording stays on your device. This site runs no analytics and no tracking scripts. We can only speak for our own end of it, and if that is the question you came with, we wrote the whole thing down on the privacy page. We also read what five practice apps publish about the audio they hear, including this one: guitar practice apps and your microphone.

Use both

If you are learning from Justin, keep learning from Justin. Strumhold has no lessons and no songs and it will not teach you a thing. What it does is take the one exercise the whole beginner course rests on, getting between two chords in time, and measure it properly, so the months when it feels like nothing is happening have a number attached to them.

You can try that without installing anything. 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