I’m DJ — a singer-songwriter from the Netherlands. I’ve been playing live for about 15 years, and alongside that I work as a developer.
I wanted to share something I’ve been building — with permission from the admins — and more importantly, get your perspective on it. It’s called Fretlist.
The problem I kept running into
I tried tools like OnSong and SongbookPro — they’re powerful — but for me they felt a bit heavy and hard to get into quickly. I wanted something web-based, modern, and simple. I couldn’t find it, so I started building it.
What Fretlist is
It’s a web app where you keep all your songs in one place.
Chords above lyrics
Works on any device (phone, tablet, laptop)
Works offline
Setlists with drag-and-drop, notes per song, and a Play Mode you can use on stage or while practicing at home
Nothing revolutionary — just trying to make the core flow feel really easy.
It’s in Early Access and free to use until launch. Around 85 musicians are using it at the moment, and honestly, they’re shaping it.
A few examples:
Offline mode came from someone who had no WiFi at rehearsal
A metronome tied to each song’s BPM came from a conversation on Threads
Import is now a priority because people want to move their existing songs in easily
I’ve put together a short demo video on the landing page if you want to see it in action.
Why I’m posting here
Most of you are actively learning and practicing — which is actually where a tool like this gets used the most. Not just on stage, but at home with your guitar.
So I’m really curious:
How do you currently organize your songs? Do you keep a “songbook” somewhere? What annoys you about your current setup?
If you feel like trying it, you can check it out here: → fretlist.com
If not, I’d still really appreciate hearing how you handle this today — that’s just as useful.
Thanks again to the admins for letting me share this here.
I’ll check it out. I’m a Songbook Pro user on Windows and Android and like it. I’ve become a fan of the Chordpro format for editing or creating songs. A few initial comments before playing with it:
I tend to edit songs in my library to add notes, strum patterns and other notes to myself as I play. I really like the colored bars Fretlist has at the top of the song with Capo and other information. It’s cleaner
The scroll option looks nice, very easy to control. I use a page turner pedal at a gig I do, but for my college class I just use the auto-scroll feature of SongBook Pro.
My main question is where is the database hosted? Online or locally on my machine? I’m assuming locally since there’s an offline mode. I do use a sync to cloud mode (Dropbox) in Songbook Pro so I can sync across my tablet, phone and home computer.
I look forward to giving it a go. I’ll mainly use it on a Windows Surface tablet and a Windows desktop.
I’m finally getting around to trying it out and running into an odd problem. I click the “Get Started” link and I get a page that tells me I’m offline. Yet I’m not offline. I’m clearly posting here.
After a few minutes, the link seemed to work just fine and I got to the account creation page.
Now that I’m in and have added a song, I have to say bulk uploading NEEDS to happen. One song at a time? Ouch.
I’ve already discussed chord diagrams. But I think you should prioritize allowing people to change text formatting. I don’t think I could have used this during the open mic where I performed the other day.
Where did my headings go? They’re in chordpro syntax. I will email you the chordpro file.
You can see that I have the chords bolded and in a more visible color. I can bold the lyrics if I want, change the size, highlight, etc. And apply these settings only to the verse or to the chorus or to whatever custom section I want. This was kinda important for this open mic because there was one tablet available. Maybe 1 person was using it, but we also performed songs with 2 people using the 1 tablet and 3 people using the 1 tablet. Without the ability to change sizes, weights, and colors of text, there’s not really a good way to make sure that the song sheet is visible in imperfect conditions.
Hey Nate, thanks for digging in and sharing those screenshots — really helpful to see the comparison.
The offline glitch on signup — thanks for flagging that. This is exactly why I’m sharing it at this stage, to catch things like this. I’ll look into it.
On the ChordPro headings — I’ll check what’s happening with custom {c: } directives. Send that file over and I’ll take a look.
Bulk import is next on my list. The reason it’s one at a time right now is intentional — I’m smoothing out the import quality first so that when bulk lands, it just works. No point importing 50 songs if the parser mangles them.
On formatting — I hear you, especially with multiple people reading from one screen. It’s on the roadmap but I want to nail the core first. One step at a time.
Hey, thanks for checking it out! Great to hear the colored bars and scroll control stood out — those are things I spent a lot of time getting right.
On your question: your songs are stored in the cloud (hosted on Supabase) and sync automatically across all your devices. So you can edit on your Windows desktop at home and it’s instantly there on your Surface tablet. No Dropbox needed — it just works.
On top of that, everything also caches locally on each device for offline use. So if you lose connection, your songs are still right there.
The editing side — notes, strum patterns, personal reminders — that’s exactly how I use it too. Would love to hear how it compares to your SongbookPro setup once you’ve had a play with it.
By the way, I like what fretlist is doing with the chords in the intro by putting slashes to separate measures. How would I set it up to show two or more chords within a measure? Say a simple and common one where each chord gets 2 beats in a measure with 4 beats. Or there are 4 chords, each getting one beat.
In the outro of one of the songs I performed, it started with the chords getting 2 beats, and then there was a measure with each chord getting 1 beat, and then the last chord got 4. I just put dots in to indicate number of beats so you’d get something like C… to indicate that chord got 2 beats. I wrote it up to look like this:
In fretlist, how could I get it to show the slashes to indicate number of beats per chord? Fretlist doesn’t really like these extra notes that I’ve been making. I also use special characters like arrows to indicate a single up- or down strum. So here, this is supposed to show that the final C chord is a single down strum that is not muted.
Also, it seems like it’s breaking stuff into a new line earlier than it needs to. It looks to me like there’s plenty of room for that final C chord, but fretlist drops it down to a new line and makes it confusing.
fretlist just considers that plain text so [Mute] appears in line with the lyrics.
I know that none of this is really standard songsheet notation. It’s my way of addressing some of the shortcomings of this chord-over-lyric notation. The dots for beats are something I picked up from a hand-written songsheet that was shared with me awhile back. But aside from those special characters, all of the other songbook programs I’ve tried seem to render them the same. Chordpro’s Windows program (which I suppose should be considered the standard for how chordpro syntax should be rendered) is the one that glitches on the arrows.
Nate, really appreciate the thorough testing! You’re finding things nobody else has. For the detailed stuff, let’s continue over email — you have my address. That way we keep the thread open for others.
