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The four modes

Every song has the same four modes, on the strip at the top of the screen. On a keyboard, ⇧1 to ⇧4 jump between them, and ? shows the shortcuts for whatever screen you’re on.

Map

Read and play. Section cards, one box per bar, words under the bar you sing them on. The beat dots only light up here, so this is also where you line a recording up with the chart.

Practice

Drill it from memory. The same map with bars hidden, so you find out what you actually know.

Reshape

Fix the shape without typing. Split and join bars, move words, rename sections — all by tapping, so it works well on a phone.

Edit

Type the song out yourself. Title, key, tempo, the running order, repeats — and anything Reshape can't do by tapping.

Getting a song in

Four ways, all on the import page. However a song gets in, its sections, chords and words come through — and the bar counts arrive as a guess for you to fix.

• Paste a chord sheet. Copy the sheet from wherever you found it and paste it into the box. Chords over lyrics, or ChordPro — both work. This is the one to use on a phone, and it works everywhere.
• Send it over from Ultimate Guitar. On a computer, drag Send to MapSongs onto your bookmarks bar once. After that, clicking it on any Ultimate Guitar chord sheet opens that sheet in MapSongs with the title, artist, key and capo already filled in. Phones don’t have a bookmarks bar, so paste instead.
• Share it from another app. Add MapSongs to your home screen, and you can share a chord sheet or a YouTube link straight to it from another app.
• Open a ChordPro file. Open a .cho file — one song, or a whole library you exported from MapSongs. Bars, sections and any sync work come back with it.

Playing along with the record

There’s one Play button, at the top of the screen, and it can play two things.

Synth plays the chart itself — the chords, and a click — and needs nothing set up.

YouTube plays the real recording, once you’ve linked a video to the song. Use “Add a recording” in the menu, or the button that appears on a song that hasn’t got one.

Pick which one you want in the bar at the bottom of the screen. MapSongs remembers your choice.

The switches beside it — loop, count-in, click and chords — work with either. With YouTube, the click and the chords play on top of the record, not instead of it. That’s what makes them useful: you get a metronome over the real take, or you can check the chord you think is coming against the one the chart says.

What “calibrate” means

A video you’ve just linked won’t line up with the chart yet. MapSongs starts out assuming the song begins at 0:00 and stays exactly on the tempo written on the sheet — and almost no recording does both. There’s usually a count-in, or a bit of silence, or the band just plays a little faster than the sheet says.

Calibrating is how you fix that. You tell MapSongs where one bar actually starts in the video, and the highlighted bar, the beat dots and the click all fall into place together.

When you link a video, MapSongs offers to walk you through it right away. Find a part of the song you know well, tap along with five or six downbeats, say which bar you were tapping, then listen back to check.

Don’t start at bar 1 or 0:00 — start at the first line of singing. It’s the one moment you can find in both places: by ear in the recording, and by reading in the chart.

Once that first point is set, the panel gives you the full set of tools: pick a bar, press play into it, tap the downbeat, then nudge until the click lands with the record. If the chart slides out of time later in the song, add a second point further in — and a third near the end.

Calibrating always happens on the Map. The beat dots are what you check it against, and they only light up there.

The calibrate button is in the same place in all four modes, and from the other three it asks before it moves you. It names the mode you’re leaving, and opens the Map when you press Go to the map. Stay here leaves everything as it was.

Work you haven’t saved doesn’t come with you unless you press Save and go to the map, which saves it first. Undo stays behind either way — what you did in the mode you left can’t be undone once you’ve gone.

What the words mean

Bar

One measure — four beats, usually. Bars are what a MapSongs chart is built out of, and they're the one thing an ordinary chord sheet doesn't write down. That's why an imported song arrives with its bars guessed, and why Reshape exists.

Downbeat

Beat one of a bar — the “one” you’d count out loud, where the main pulse lands. Often the chord changes there too. Every calibration point marks a downbeat, because it’s the easiest moment to pick out of a recording by ear.

Capo, shapes and sounding key

With a capo on, the shape your hand makes and the chord you hear are two different chords. A capo-3 sheet says G because G is the shape you finger; what actually comes out of the guitar is B♭. MapSongs shows you the shapes — what you play. On a song with a capo, the “As written / As it sounds” switch in the settings row decides which of the two you read. Stay on “As written” if something is already moving your instrument — a capo, or a keyboard with transpose set to the capo. Pick “As it sounds” if nothing is: acoustic piano, bass, or transpose off. It changes the letters on the page, not what plays.

Roman numerals and Nashville numbers

The same chord counted from the key instead of named. In the key of G: G is I (or 1), C is IV (4), D is V (5). Two ways of writing one idea — Roman numerals come from classical music, Nashville numbers from session players. They’re worth learning: once you read in numbers, you start noticing that a song you’re learning has the same shape as three you already know. MapSongs works them out as you go, so switching notation or transposing never changes what’s stored.

Pick

Choose which bar you’re about to mark. Tap a bar on the map, or use the ‹ › arrows in the calibrate panel. Nothing is saved yet — you’re only pointing at a bar.

Mark

Mark the spot. With a bar picked, press “play into it” — the recording starts a bar early, so you can count yourself in and be ready. Then tap the ⏺ button along with every downbeat you hear, and MapSongs notes where in the video they fell. Your first tap is always a little late and gets ignored, so four or five taps land it far closer than one.

Calibration point

One bar, pinned to one moment in the recording. A single point is usually enough to line the whole song up. If the chart slowly slides out of time later on, add a second point further in and a third near the end — real bands speed up and slow down, and extra points follow them.

ChordPro

A plain-text chord sheet format that puts the chords in brackets inside the lyric, like [C]this. Plenty of music apps read it. MapSongs imports it, and saves every song as a .cho file you can open elsewhere — with your bars, sections and sync tucked in alongside, so a file from MapSongs comes back into MapSongs complete.