Make a backing track from a chord progression
Type the chords you want to practise over, choose a style, set the tempo, and a band plays them back on a loop for as long as you keep playing. No video, no audio file, no signup — and unlike a jam track you find and forget, the minutes land in the same practice record as everything else you do.
▶ Open Quick Jam — free, no signup it opens as a guest; Quick Jam has its own tab on the dashboard
How it works
- Enter the changes. Pick a root and a quality for each bar — twelve roots, eighteen qualities, up to sixteen bars. Major or minor at a tap, or start from one of the ten style cards, each of which arrives with a progression already in it.
- Choose the feel. Rock, Blues Shuffle, Pop, Ballad, Funk, Folk / Country, Reggae, Jazz Swing, Waltz in 3/4, or 6/8. The card carries the groove and a sensible starting tempo, so the first thing you hear is a band and not a metronome with chords on it.
- Set the tempo and play. Anywhere from 40 to 200 BPM. Turn on Auto speed-up and it nudges the tempo along as the loop repeats, so the climb happens while your hands stay on the instrument.
The band is drums, bass, keys and guitar, played from recorded instruments rather than synthesised ones. Each track has its own mute, solo and volume, so you can drop the guitar out to hear your own comping, or leave only the drums and bass and practise the changes over a rhythm section.
Quick Jam still carries a beta badge in the app, which is worth saying on a page that is trying to get you to open it: the band plays, the chords are yours, and the parts still being worked on are the edges rather than the middle.
It does not listen, and it does not guess
Two honest limits, because they are the first things people ask.
We do not detect chords. There is no analysis step and nothing is listening to a recording: you enter the progression, which means it is exactly the one you meant. If what you actually want is for software to tell you the chords of a song you already have, this is not that tool and it will not pretend to be.
There is no video, and that is the point. Quick Jam is for the practice that has nothing on screen — running ii–V–I in twelve keys, drilling a change that keeps catching you, warming up before you touch anything else.
What makes this worth keeping open
You can build one in about fifteen seconds and then keep it: save it with a name — up to twenty-four of them, Blues in F, the bridge, Tuesday's warm-up — and it sits beside the ten the app ships with, remembering the chords, the tempo and the mix you last actually heard.
The reason that matters here rather than anywhere else is the record. Time in Quick Jam logs against your practice history exactly like time spent looping a video: the daily total, the streak, the practice stairway. Warming up over changes for ten minutes stops being time that vanished, which is the whole argument of the practice tracker — and the reason this and the loop-and-slow work on YouTube videos share one log rather than two.
Getting more out of it
- Practise the change, not the progression. If one bar-to-bar move is the problem, build a two-bar loop of just those two chords and sit on it.
- Know the ceiling. A jam is up to sixteen bars, which covers a blues, a vamp, a turnaround or one section of a tune, and does not cover a full thirty-two-bar form in one loop. If you need the whole form, build the sections as separate saved jams.
- Start slower than feels reasonable. Clean at 60 beats sloppy at 100, and Auto speed-up will take you back up without you touching anything.
- Use solo and mute as ear training. Kill everything but the bass and you have to hear the change rather than follow the guitar into it.
Free vs Pro, honestly
Quick Jam is free, on every tier, with no account — all ten styles, the full chord vocabulary, the tempo range, Auto speed-up, the mixer and saved jams. So is the rest of the practice core: looping and slowing YouTube videos, named loops, the automatic practice log and stats, spaced Review, and the recap image. Uploading your own files to practise the same way is free as well, with a free account. Pro is £4.99 / €5.99 / $6 a month, or £47 / €57 / $58 a year, and it buys cloud sync for those uploads, splitting an uploaded song into its separate tracks, and two deeper stats surfaces. None of it is Quick Jam.
One thing worth knowing before you invest an evening in naming jams: saved jams currently live in the browser you made them in. They follow you into an account if you sign up on that device, but they do not yet sync between devices.
FAQ
Do I need to know the chords already?
Yes — you type them in, so you need the progression, not the ear to find it. Every style card ships with a working progression in both major and minor, which is enough to practise over while you learn to build your own.
Can it work out the chords of a song for me?
No. There is no chord detection here and none is planned as part of this feature. If you know the changes, this plays them; if you do not, you will need to find them elsewhere first.
Is this the same as the play-along tracks?
No, and the difference matters. Quick Jam generates a band from chords you type, with no source recording involved. A play-along track is made from a real song you upload, by muting one of its six separated tracks so you can play that part — the actual recording, minus you. Different problem, different feature, and that one is Pro.
Does the time actually count as practice?
It does. Minutes in Quick Jam log against your daily total, your streak and the practice stairway, filed under Quick Jam so you can still see what the time went on.
What instruments does the band play?
Drums, bass, keys and guitar, from recorded samples. You can mute or solo any of them and change each one's volume, and swap some for alternate sounds.
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. It runs in the browser like the rest of the app, and the app can be added to a phone home screen.
Fifteen seconds to a band, and the time counts. Type four chords, pick a groove, and go.