Free· no ads· try the demo first
Master your favorite songs. Play them from memory.
Stop scrolling. MapSongs turns an ordinary chord sheet into a color-coded map of the song — real bars, real sections, lyrics sitting under the bar they actually land on — and syncs it to the recording, so the chart moves with the record while you play. No thumbing the screen mid-chorus. No autoscroll that's always a half-beat off.
Free for everyone. No ads, and nothing you use today ever moves behind a paywall. Built for guitar, keys, bass, and voice.
You've been reading songs, not learning them
Be honest about how it usually goes. You find the tab. You know verse one cold — because verse one is the part that fits on the screen. Then the chorus arrives and you're thumbing at your phone with one hand while the band keeps going without you. Three weeks later you still can't play it without the screen.
That's not a practice problem. That's a format problem.
- Ultimate Guitar
Hands you a wall of monospace text with chords hovering vaguely over syllables. You're left guessing exactly when your hands need to move while you sing, and you scroll frantically hoping you land on the right line.
- Chordify
Gives you rigid, identical beat squares that ignore the song's actual build. Where does the bridge start? The grid doesn't care.
MapSongs shows you the song as a map. A colored card per section, one box per bar, the beats ticking inside it, and each line of the lyric sitting under the bar you actually sing it on. No more guessing when to sing and when to strum.
Suddenly you can see it: the chorus is eight bars, the pre-chorus is six, the bridge is the verse with one chord changed. That's the shape musicians actually memorize. Once you've seen it, you stop reading the song and start knowing it.
How it works
Three steps. The middle one is the one nobody expects, and it's the one that does the work.
- 1
Import any song — in about a minute
Paste whatever you've got, from anywhere, and watch it turn into a chart as you type — that works on a phone too. On a computer, keep the Send to MapSongs button in your bookmarks bar and one click pulls a sheet straight off Ultimate Guitar, with the title, artist, key and capo already filled in. Drop in a ChordPro file if that's how your charts are saved. No retyping a sheet you already have.
- 2
Shape the groove — this is where memorization starts
No chord sheet on the internet encodes bar counts, so every import arrives as a first guess you correct. Tap a seam to split or merge bars, walk a chord or a word into the next bar, link the sections that repeat. Deciding the chorus is eight bars means you counted it — and that's the part your hands remember later.
- 3
Sync and play until it sticks
Paste a YouTube link, tap along with a few bars where the singing starts, and the chart follows the actual recording bar by bar. Take it down to quarter speed with everything still in sync. Loop the four bars you keep fumbling. Then start hiding bars until the map is blank and you're just playing the song.
Why it's free
Somebody once showed you your first song.
I'm a player, not a startup. I built MapSongs because I was tired of learning songs the hard way, and I use it every week. It's free because a tool for learning music should be within reach of anyone who wants to learn — so there's no trial running out, no upsell for what you already have, and nothing that works today taken away later. What it costs is my evenings, and I'd spend those on it anyway.
If it saves you an evening of hunting for where the chorus starts, that's the whole return. If you'd like it to keep getting better, there's a way to chip in — it buys you no features and no badge; it keeps this free for the player who finds it after you, and gets the next thing built sooner. And if you'd rather not, do the other thing: teach somebody the song. Sit with the friend who keeps fumbling the change.
This is my contribution to you. Who gets yours?
What's in it
Play along with the record
Link any YouTube video and the highlighted bar follows the real recording — the actual take, with the actual feel, not a computer's stiff imitation. Tap any bar to send the recording straight there.
Slow it down and loop it
Drop the recording to 25% speed, still perfectly synced, and hear what the guitarist actually played. Loop a section hands-free, with a count-in and a metronome click over the top.
Put it in your key
Move the whole chart to a key that suits your voice, and read it as chord letters, Roman numerals (vi–V–IV–I) or Nashville numbers (6- 5 4 1) — what the chords are doing, not just what they're called.
The chart moves; the record can't — YouTube plays the take in the key it was cut in. A transposed chart is for playing on your own, with MapSongs' own chords and click.
Memory drills
Progressive hiding covers more and more bars until you're playing from memory. Shuffled sections drops you into the song out of order — the way a jam actually will.
Your portable library
Search by title or artist and see at a glance what's still rough and what you've checked against the recording. Every song, or the whole library, downloads as ChordPro — nothing is trapped in here.
Your songs stay yours
MapSongs is a practice room, not a stage. There's no public library, no feed, no followers, no discovery page — because none of that helps you play the bridge from memory. MapSongs doesn't host, fetch or publish lyrics: you bring your own chart, and it's saved privately and securely to your account.
Nothing you type goes anywhere unless you hand someone a copy — and when you do, the whole song rides inside the link itself rather than getting posted somewhere. It only exists where you send it. MapSongs never receives a copy of it, stores none, and keeps no record that the link was ever made.
No ads. Nobody following you around the internet, and nothing about you for sale. The only thing counted is how many people opened a page — no cookies, and no way to tell that one of them was you.
One last thing: add MapSongs to your phone or tablet home screen and it opens like an app: full screen, and the screen won't go dark on you halfway through a song. Prop it on the music stand and it stays readable from playing distance — even on the small old phone that lives in your gig bag.
Bring one song you've been meaning to learn properly.
That's the whole pitch.
And when you can play it without looking — show somebody else how.