How to use Chordisplay.

Getting started

Starting a library of your own

Choose a plan at app.chordisplay.com/start, and your account is made from the checkout — the address you pay with is the address you sign in with. 30 days free, and the card isn't charged until they're up.

There is no password, ever. Signing in is a six-digit code emailed to you, every time, so there's nothing to create and nothing to reset.

A new library is empty, and it can't see anyone else's charts. Nothing in Chordisplay is public: signed out, there's a login screen and nothing behind it.

If you were invited

Someone adding you to their setlist creates your account for you. Sign in with the address they used — a code is emailed to it — and their setlist is waiting. You won't have a library of your own yet, which is usually right: you're playing from theirs.

If you want one, Account → Subscription offers it as a block at the top of the screen. Taking it changes nothing about the access you already have; owning a library and working in someone else's are separate things, and plenty of people do both.

Chordisplay doesn't come with songs

This is the one thing worth knowing before you start. Chordisplay is where the charts you already have live — it isn't a place to go looking for a song. You bring your own, and the first thing to do is put one in.

Writing a chart

Web: the logo takes you to your charts; New chart is at the top right. App: Account → Library → Manage Charts.

Chords, sections and notes

A chart is plain text. Three markings change how a line is drawn, and a line with none of them is a lyric.

[Am C G]

Chords. The line sits above the lyric line that follows it.

{Chorus}

A section title.

&watch the turnaround&

A note to yourself or the band.

That's the whole format. There's nothing to learn beyond it, and nothing is required — a chart of only chord lines is a fine chart.

Why the spaces matter

Space a chord line out until the chords sit where you want them in the editor, and they'll sit there everywhere — phone, tablet, laptop, and in the file if you export it. What you type is what the band reads.

Verse 1
Am       C        D        F
There is a house in New Orleans
Am           C      E
They call the Rising Sun
Straight into the chorus — no turnaround

The rest of the fields

• Title — the only one that's required.
• Artist — shown next to the title, and searchable.
• Categories — a chart can have several. This is how you keep one band's repertoire separate from another's inside one library.
• Key — shown on the chart, for reference.
• Tempo — in BPM. Setting it gives the chart a pulse on the phone and tablet apps; leave it empty and no pulse shows.

Editing needs a connection

On purpose. There's no offline editing because there's no sync back, and there's no sync back because nothing should change under you mid-show. Make the changes before you leave the house and they're on every device by the time you get there.

Importing charts

Web: Account → Import. App: Account → Import Charts.

Chordisplay reads ChordPro files and its own Markdown export. Pick as many as you like at once — a whole folder's worth is the normal case when you're moving in. What's inside each file decides how it's read, not what the file is called, so a .txt full of ChordPro still lands correctly.

1. Choose the files.
2. Read the preview. It lists every file and what it's about to do with it — bring it in, rename it because the title is taken, or skip it because you already have it.
3. Import.

Nothing is written until you press that button. Imported charts are flagged New until you've looked at them, so a hundred songs arriving at once doesn't disappear into the middle of your library.

There's no PDF import, and no PDF display or annotation either. If your charts are PDFs, Chordisplay can't take them.

Finding a song

Your charts are the front page of the app. On the web, the logo goes there from anywhere.

• By first letter — the row of letters at the top. All is the whole library.
• By category — the blocks under the letters, built from the categories you've given your charts.
• By name — pick a letter or a category first, then the search box filters what's in front of you by title and artist.
• By setlist — your setlists are on the same screen, below the categories.

If every chart is greyed out and marked Locked, the library's subscription has lapsed. See Subscription.

Reading a chart two other ways

Lyrics Only drops the chord lines and leaves the words. Form Only leaves nothing but the section titles. Both are on the chart itself, and neither changes what's stored — press again to put it back.

Tidying your categories

Web: Account → Categories. Rename one everywhere it's used, merge two spellings of the same thing by renaming one onto the other, or remove one. Each says how many charts carry it, and whose access is described by it, before you decide — renaming follows the name into anyone's access that named it.

Building a setlist

Web: New setlist, on the browse screen under your existing ones. App: Account → Library → Manage Setlists.

Only an Owner creates a setlist, because a setlist is the thing access is granted on — see Giving people access. If you need one and you're not the Owner, ask them; it's a ten-second job at their end.

Adding and ordering songs

1. Open the setlist and press Edit.
2. Under Add a Song, search your charts by title and press Add.
3. Move a song with the ↑ and ↓ buttons on its row, until the order matches how the set actually goes.
4. Remove takes a song out. The chart itself is untouched.

The same song twice

Add it twice. Each occurrence is its own entry with its own tempo and arrangement, so an encore reprise can be slower than the first pass without either one disturbing the other.

Playing from it

Opening a setlist shows the running order. Open a song from it and you get Previous and Next through the set in order, so you're never going back out to a list between songs. Editing is behind theEdit button and stays out of the way while you play.

When two of you are on it at once

Open a song somebody else is already in and Chordisplay tells you who, and offers to take it over. You don't wait for permission, and they're told when you do.

Nobody's work gets overwritten either way — a save written against a version that has moved on is refused rather than applied. And every song in the running order says who last edited it and when.

Renaming and deleting

Open the setlist and press Edit. Renaming is the pencil beside the title; deleting is under Danger Zone at the foot. Both are Owner-only — Editors can change what's in a set but not the set itself.

Changing a song for one set

A song you add to a setlist is a copy of the chart it came from. Change it there — a different tempo, a note about the ending, a completely reworked arrangement — and only that set changes.

1. Open the setlist and tap the song.
2. Change Tempo, or edit the Chart body, or both.
3. Save.

The copy is independent in both directions. Editing the setlist song never touches the chart in the library, and editing that chart afterwards never reaches into the setlist. If you want a set to pick up a change you've made to your chart, remove the song and add it again — that's what fetches a fresh copy.

It's shared, not private. Everyone on that setlist reads what you wrote. That's the point of it: whoever is putting the set together marks up the arrangement, and the band opens the same thing at the gig. What nobody else can change is a chart in the Owner's library.

Which is exactly what makes marking a set up freely safe. Your charts stay put; the set is where the band meets.

Giving people access

Web: open the setlist, press Edit, and use Who's on This Setlist. App: Account → Sharing → People. Owners only.

Access is to one setlist at a time, not to your library. Adding the bass player to Friday's set doesn't show them the other four hundred charts, and it doesn't show them your other band's setlists.

Adding people is always free, however many. Only the person whose library it is pays for anything.

Adding someone

Under Invite an Individual to This Setlist:

1. Their email. That's what they'll sign in with.
2. Pick Editor or Viewer.
3. Pick what they can add songs from.
4. Send invitation.

They get an email, and sign in with a code sent to that address. There's no password to share, and nothing for you to reset later.

The three roles

A role describes a relationship to a setlist, not a rank you hold. The same person can own their library, be an Editor on someone's Friday gig, and be a Viewer on a third.

What songs an Editor can add from

An Editor adding a song has to be able to search for one, so you decide what they're searching. It's set per person, on their row under Who's on This Setlist:

• Nothing — the default. They reorder and mark up what's already there. The only charts they can see are that setlist's songs.
• One category — they can search and add from that category, and nothing outside it exists to them. This is how one library serves two bands.
• The whole library — for the band you'd trust with all of it.

Two Editors on one set can have different answers — the bandleader adds from the whole library, the dep adds nothing. The default is Nothing, because the safe answer should be the one you get by not thinking about it, and a group you attach fills in its own.

Taking access away

Change a role or what somebody can add from on their row under Who's on This Setlist. Taking them off that setlist is the✕ at the end of the row, and Account → Individuals lists everyone you've invited by name if you'd rather work from there. Either way it takes effect on their next tap, not at their next sign-in.

Groups

Web: Account → Groups, and Groups on This Setlist on the setlist itself. App: Account → Sharing → Groups.

A group is a named list of people — your Tuesday band, say. It does two jobs: it adds everyone to a setlist at once, and it remembers the role and the search limit you'd otherwise set every single time.

Attach a group to a setlist and it fills in that setlist's settings. You can change them afterwards, and the setlist keeps its own copy from then on — editing the group's defaults later won't reach back into setlists it's already on, in case you narrowed one deliberately.

Membership is live, and that's the part to watch. Adding someone to a group gives them every setlist it's attached to, past and future. Removing them takes it all away. Each group screen tells you how many setlists it currently grants, and every change reports what it just handed over or took back.

If two groups on one setlist disagree about what can be added, the narrower one wins and you're told.

Sending charts to another Owner

Anyone who keeps a library of their own can be sent charts from yours. You choose how much goes at once:

• One chart — open it, press Edit, and use Share with Another Owner at the foot.
• A whole category — every chart filed under it, in one go, from Account → Share Charts.
• Your entire library, from the same screen.

It's an offer, and they accept it. Nothing is written into anybody's library because you said so. Before they accept, they see how many charts are new to them, how many arrive as a second version of something they already have, and how much room they have left. You can withdraw an offer they haven't answered.

What lands is their copy, and it stays theirs. From that moment the two charts have nothing to do with each other — your edits don't reach them and theirs don't reach you. Nothing you send ever writes over anything they hold. Send a corrected version of a song they already took and it arrives alongside their copy, marked with who it came from, and they keep both; sending a chart you've not changed since they took it delivers nothing at all. Everything that arrives is flagged New until they've looked at it.

There's no syncing, deliberately. Two people in a band who both keep their own charts have two separate libraries, not a shared one. Both can build setlists, both can add people, and neither can edit the other's charts: your canon is yours, and nobody else's edit overwrites the version you actually play.

Account → Share Charts keeps a history of what you've already sent, to whom, and when.

Transposing

Open a chart and use the − and + steppers by the key. Each press moves everything a semitone, and Reset puts it back.

The chords are respelled to suit where you've landed rather than being dragged along from where you started: transpose into Eb and you get flats, into E and you get sharps. The columns hold, so the chords stay where you put them over the words.

Nothing is saved. Transposing is how you're reading the chart, not what's stored — so a singer can drop a song a tone for their range without changing it for anybody else. Leave the chart and it's back in its written key.

The exception is the editor, where the same steppers are there to change the song rather than to read it: they rewrite the text in front of you, and Save keeps it. Cancel leaves the stored chart as it was.

There's no capo setting. If you import a ChordPro file with a capo directive in it, the value survives as a note on the chart, but nothing calculates with it.

On stage

Offline

Every chart and every setlist is pulled onto your device while you're online — whole bodies, not just the songs you happened to open. When the signal goes, everything still opens.

Nothing to switch on. Open the app somewhere with signal before you leave and it's already done. If the venue's Wi-Fi is the kind that connects and then does nothing, requests give up after five seconds and fall back to the copy on the device rather than hanging.

Reading works offline. Editing doesn't — see Writing a chart. And the cache clears when anyone signs in or out, so a tablet that lives on the stand and gets passed around never leaves one person's library behind for the next.

A Bluetooth page-turner pedal

The phone and tablet apps only. In a browser, a pedal can't work on an iPhone or iPad at all — Safari never hands those key presses to the page. That's a limitation of iOS itself, not of your pedal or your settings, and no website can get around it. An app is on the other side of that boundary, so the press simply arrives.

1. Pair the pedal in your device's own Bluetooth settings. Any pedal that presents itself as a keyboard works.
2. Set the pedal to page up/down mode or arrow key mode.
3. Open a chart in the Chordisplay app and press it.

Both modes do something useful, and they're worth knowing apart:

• Page up / page down — moves a screen at a time, for reading straight through.
• Up / down arrows — a line at a time, for nudging into position.

The tempo pulse

Give a chart a tempo and its header shows a dot pulsing at that BPM on the phone and tablet apps. No sound, no click track — something to catch out of the corner of your eye when you're counting a song in.

Your account

Web: Account → Your Details. App: Account → Your Details.

• Name — yours to change. Whoever invited you filled it in, and once you've set it they can't change it back.
• Picture — optional. No picture is the normal case and shows your initials instead.
• Email — can't be changed in the app, deliberately. Your address is your credential, since there's no password behind it, and a field that changes it is a field that takes an account over. Ask us and we'll do it: support@chordisplay.com.

The devices you're signed in on

Web: Account → Security. Every device this account is signed in on, when each was last used, and which one you're reading on now. Sign out everywhere else ends all the others — the thing to reach for when a tablet stays at the rehearsal room or a laptop goes.

Deleting your account

Account → Danger Zone, on both. You're shown the real numbers before you confirm: how many charts and setlists go, and how many people lose the material they've been playing from.

You have thirty days to change your mind. Signing back in during them restores everything, in full, with nothing said about it — signing in is the way back, and there's no separate step. Your subscription stops renewing straight away, so you're never charged for time you're gone, and signing back in turns it on again.

After the thirty days your charts are deleted for good. A setlist somebody else is on is left behind rather than destroyed, locked, for an Owner among its Editors to take over — see Subscription. Setlists nobody else is on go with the charts.

Export first if you want any of it — the delete screen offers it in the same step, and see Getting your work out.

Subscription

Account → Subscription, in the web app. That's also where you change plan or cancel. The phone and tablet apps read your plan and don't have a checkout in them, so don't go looking for one there.

The free trial

30 days, with a card entered up front. At the end of the 30 days the first payment goes through automatically. Cancel before then and you're charged nothing at all.

The trial is the whole product — every platform, offline, the pedal, and your whole band on your setlists. There's nothing held back and no chart limit to work around.

What it costs

$7 a month, or $6 a month if you pay for the year at once — $72, instead of $84.

Only the library's Owner pays. Everyone you add is free, however many there are — they're working in your library, so there's nothing to charge them for. A five-piece band is one subscription. Two people who each keep their own charts is two, because that's two libraries.

If you cancel

Cancelling runs to the end of the period you've already paid for — there's no proration and no partial refund. A trial cancelled before it ends charges nothing at all.

After that the library locks: every chart and setlist is still listed, greyed out and not playable, in your library and inside any setlist it appears in. Everyone you've given access to sees the same thing — they were never billed and nothing of theirs is at stake.

Nothing is deleted, ever. Not after a month, not after a year, not at any distance. Locked is where a lapsed library stops and it stops there permanently. Subscribe again whenever you like and all of it comes back exactly as you left it.

One thing can be lost, and it isn't a chart. While a library is locked, an Editor on one of its setlists who runs a library of their own can take that setlist over — the band's running order carries on without you, its songs become charts in their library, and everyone else is re-invited by them. It's how a band isn't stranded by somebody else's billing. Subscribing again unlocks everything you still have and doesn't return a setlist that's gone this way. Your charts are never affected: they're yours, and they all come back.

And export ignores the lock completely — see Getting your work out. Locked means you can't play from it. It never means you can't have it.

Getting your work out

Your charts are plain text and you can have them back at any point, in a format that opens anywhere.

• One chart — Export on the chart.
• A setlist — Export, on the setlist's Edit screen. It comes out in running order with that set's own tempos and arrangements applied, so what you get is the version you actually played.
• Everything — Account → Export on the web, or Account → Library → Export My Library in the app. A zip with one Markdown file per chart.

Each file carries its title, artist, key, tempo and categories at the top, then the chart body exactly as you wrote it.

Locked charts come out too. A lapsed subscription stops you playing from them in the app; it was never meant to stop you having them.

Getting help

Web: Account → Feedback. App: Account → Support.

• Report a bug — something is broken. What you were doing when it broke is the useful part.
• Suggest something — something is missing.
• Report content — a chart, a setlist, or someone's behaviour. Reports come to us, never to the person you're reporting.

Or email support@chordisplay.com. Support, privacy and terms all live at support.chordisplay.com.

The FAQ covers the questions that come up before signing up rather than after.