Free· no ads· try the demo first
Master your favorite songs. Play them from memory.
MapSongs turns a chord sheet into a color-coded map of the song — bars, sections, and the words under the bar you sing them on — that follows the recording on YouTube while you play.
Free for everyone. No ads, and nothing you use today ever moves behind a paywall. Built for guitar, keys, bass, and voice.
See it in 15 seconds
Turn the sound on: the highlighted bar follows the recording, then the synth takes over the chords so you can play along.
You’ve been reading songs, not learning them
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 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 text with chords floating over syllables, and you scroll mid-song hoping to 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.
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 memorize, and once you’ve seen it, you stop reading the song and start knowing it.
How it works
- 1
Import any song — in about a minute
Paste a chord sheet from anywhere and it turns into a chart as you type, on a phone too. On a computer, the Send to MapSongs button in your bookmarks bar pulls a sheet straight off Ultimate Guitar. Or drop in a ChordPro file.
On the demo song: paste a whole chord sheet, and the title, key, capo and tempo fill in as the chart appears below. - 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.
On the demo song: the import split three bars in two and left two words in the wrong bar. Five taps fix both. - 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 recording bar by bar. Then hide bars, a few at a time, until you’re playing the song from memory.
On the demo song: find where the singing starts, tap four downbeats, and confirm the bar.
Why it’s free
Somebody once showed you your first song.
I’m a player, and I built MapSongs because I was tired of learning songs the hard way. It’s free because learning music should be within reach of anyone who wants to: no trial, no charge for what you already use, and nothing that works today taken away later.
If you’d like to help, you can chip in, or teach somebody the song.
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, or drag through the recording and the chart follows.
Slow it down and loop it
Drop the recording to 25% speed, still perfectly synced, and hear what the guitarist actually played. Loop a whole section hands-free, or just the four bars you keep missing, with a count-in before every pass and a metronome click over the top.
Put it in your key
Too high to sing? Pick the key that suits your voice and MapSongs shows where the capo goes, so you keep the chord shapes you already know. The easiest options come first, and barre chords are highlighted. On a keyboard, it tells you what to set transpose to. Or move the whole chart, and read it as chord letters, Roman numerals (vi–V–IV–I) or Nashville numbers (6- 5 4 1).
The recording stays in the key it was cut in — YouTube can’t move it. In another key, play along with MapSongs’ own chords and click instead.
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: no public library, no feed, no followers. You bring your own chart. MapSongs doesn’t host or publish lyrics, and your songs are saved privately to your account.
A song you share travels inside the link itself, and MapSongs never receives a copy.
There are no ads, and nothing follows you around the internet. The only thing counted is page visits, without cookies.
One last thing: add MapSongs to your home screen and it opens like an app. It keeps the screen awake through a song and opens your songs offline, in the rehearsal basement or on a plane.
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.