Polychord vs ScaleGen
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Polychord
Create music with an intuitive interface that makes playing chords easy for everyone. Explore songwriting, strum and solo with confidence, and even add auto-accompaniment. Advanced MIDI features allow integration with popular music production software.
- Play chords from diverse palettes
- Strum and solo in key
- Auto-accompaniment band feature
- MIDI control for DAWs
- Songwriting tools
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Polychord turns your iPad into a chord instrument — a full band at your fingertips. Nine chord circles hold every chord in your key — arranged so the right one is always under your fingers. Tap a circle to hear it, and the ring around it offers the colors: sevenths, sixths, suspensions. Strum across the keys like a harp. You can't hit a wrong note, and you never have to stop and think. Flip on Auto Accompany and a rhythm section falls in behind you: bass and drums that follow every chord change you make, in styles from folk to funk to krautrock. One finger becomes a band. When something good happens, hit record. Loop, layer, and bounce it to audio, or export multi-track MIDI with chords, strum, bass, arpeggiator, and drums on separate tracks, ready for your DAW. In the studio, Polychord comes with you. The AUv3 MIDI-effect plugin puts the chord grid inside DAWs like Logic Pro that support MIDI effects, and MIDI in and out means it can play — or be played by — everything else you own. Whether you've played for twenty years or never learned an instrument, Polychord closes the gap between imagining music and making it. FEATURES • Nine chord circles covering the full harmony of any major or minor key • Chord palettes for folk, jazz, gospel, bossa nova, soul, cinematic, and more • Strum keys with pitch bend • Auto Accompany: bass lines and drum patterns that follow your chords • Arpeggiator with adjustable direction, rate, and octave span • Built-in wavetable synth with ADSR envelopes, filter, delay, and bitcrusher • Record performances and bounce to audio • Multi-track MIDI export: chords, strum, bass, arpeggiator, and drums on separate tracks • MIDI out to any app or hardware; MIDI in to trigger chords from a keyboard • You can even split your MIDI output to trigger multiple instruments at once in DAWs like Logic • AUv3 MIDI-effect plugin: play the chord grid inside your favorite host • AUv3 works in DAWs like Logic Pro that support MIDI effect plug-ins Polychord is a one-time purchase. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no account. Your music stays yours.
ScaleGen
Generate and edit musical scales with intricate detail. Explore traditional and experimental tunings, audition your creations, and export them as MIDI files or to other applications. Ideal for composers and students seeking to expand their musical horizons.
- Generate and manipulate musical scales
- Detailed scale definition and editing
- Audition scales within the app
- Export as MIDI or to Gestrument
- Predefined scales from various traditions
- Explore microtonal and experimental tunings
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ScaleGen - the ultimate scale generator and editor! Generate and manipulate musical scales in any way you can imagine. You think you know what a scale is - think again. In ScaleGen you can do all that you would traditionally imagine when it comes to scales and pitch organisation, and then much, much more. Define or change scales in the most detailed and intricate way. Audition the scales you make from within the app or export it as a MIDI file or to our app Gestrument - the revolutionary gesture-instrument. This is the tool for anyone who wants to go beyond the traditional tonalities in whichever genre. ScaleGen comes with predefined scales of all kinds - from the traditional western scales and early music (Baroque/Renaissance) scales to asian scales from India, Indonesia and elsewhere as well as more conceptual scales based in the classical contemporary music. This is the ultimate tool for experimental composers in any genre as well as for musicians who want to explore new ways of thinking about music. The educational aspects of how pitches can be organised makes ScaleGen a must have for serious music students. But the directness of the app makes the learning both fun and artistically developing. What is a scale? For most people it is a collection of pitches within one octave, with equal temperament (all half tone steps equally long) or with microtonal intonation. That kind of scales are of course possible to make and edit in ScaleGen which gives you a keyboard with complete control of up to 24 pitches within one octave. But the most interesting things with ScaleGen is when you start to think of a scale as something more open. Consider these questions: What if your scale was different in every octave? Why must a scale always go from down to up? What if you could use a variation of the overtone series as a scale? How does it sound if you divide the octave in five steps instead of twelve? In ScaleGen we define a scale as any list of MIDI pitches that you can manipulate in many ways. You can start with a keyboard to input pitches, you can use the concept of the overtone series with multiplication of frequencies, you can define the number and size of the steps in the scale or you can import MIDI files and use them as scales. Then you can fine-tune your scale in a matrix with a number of tools. You can then try and play your scale directly in the app, using built-in sounds or control your favorite external synthesizer/app through MIDI. If you want to try and play on your newly created scales in another way we recommend you open them in the app Gestrument - the revolutionary gesture-instrument. But you can also save the scales as text, Scala, or MIDI files and open them in another program.
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Polychord at every 2 months against ScaleGen's every 29 months. Polychord also leads on ratings volume (39 vs 12). ScaleGen's advantage is price ($3.99 vs $9.99) and rating (4.7 vs 4.4). On review sentiment, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Polychord costs $9.99 and ScaleGen $3.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
ScaleGen holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.4. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 39 and 12 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 75% of Polychord's written reviews are positive against 71% of ScaleGen's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Polychord ships an update every 2 months, ScaleGen every 29 months. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 26, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Polychord | ScaleGen |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $9.99 | $3.99 — better |
| Rating | 4.4 (39 ratings) | 4.7 (12 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 74.8% of reviews — better | 70.6% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 39 — better | 12 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months — better | Every 29 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPad | iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 10.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 23 MB | 14 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Apposite | Gestrument AB |
Customer experience
Polychord
ScaleGen
Bugs and requests
Polychord
Reported bugs
10 issues- App crashes during recording
- Incompatible with iOS 8+ on older devices
- MIDI off messages not sent properly
- Sporadic glitches with Logic Pro and GarageBand
- Sound occasionally disappears until app restart
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- Strum keys disappear or become unresponsive
- Record button resets project
- Chord release affects all sustained chords
- Visual glitches on Retina display
- App not receiving updates for compatibility
Requested features
20 requests- Custom chord creation and palette selection
- Copy and paste functionality
- Save and load configurations/presets
- Additional instrument sounds and drum kits
- Retina display support
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- Metronome and click track
- Recording improvements (overdub, undo)
- Visual chord progression tracker
- Velocity control via accelerometer
- Chord builder for custom chords
- Master tune control
- Extended chord types (M9, m9, M13, etc.)
- Slash chords support
- More scales (bebop, mixolydian, etc.)
- Strum keys with note labels
- Full iPad width strum section
- AUv3 plugin support
- Inverted chord options
- MIDI channel routing
- Audio copy/paste support
ScaleGen
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Polychord
No in-app purchases
ScaleGen
No in-app purchases









