When you are on stage, the rules change. Your hands are on the instrument, the song is moving whether you are ready or not, and the last thing you want is to be poking at a tablet between songs. A chord sheet on a stand is only useful if you never have to touch it.
That is what Play Mode is built to do at a gig. It is Fretlist's full-screen performance view, and once you open a setlist in it, you can get through an entire show without laying a finger on the screen.
How do I play a whole setlist in Play Mode?
Open a setlist and tap Play Setlist, and Fretlist drops into Play Mode on the first song with the whole set loaded behind it. You can also open a single song that belongs to a set and Play Mode will still carry the rest of the setlist with it.
A song counter and previous and next arrows sit in the header, so you always know where you are in the show (song 4 of 18) and can jump a song in either direction. Each song keeps its own saved key, capo, and transposition, so the sheet looks exactly the way you set it up in rehearsal.
How do I move between songs in a set?
A few ways, depending on what is in reach. Swipe left or right on the sheet, or use the arrow keys on a keyboard. The genuinely hands-free option, though, is a Bluetooth foot pedal.
Any Bluetooth foot pedal or page turner that sends keyboard events (Page Up, Page Down, or arrow keys) works in Play Mode with no setup inside the app. Pair it to your device once, and a tap of your foot steps through the songs in your set while your hands stay on the instrument.
What happens at the end of a song?
When a song scrolls to its end, an end-of-song pill slides up offering the next song. You can tap it to move on, or set it to auto-advance in Settings, in which case the next song loads on its own and starts scrolling, with a short pause so you can catch your breath between songs.
Paired with auto-scroll that paces itself to each song's length and a foot pedal for the moments you want manual control, this means you can run a set start to finish hands-free. The pill is also there on a single song, where it simply takes you back to the top to play it again.
Will the screen stay on, and does it work without venue WiFi?
Both are handled, because both will ruin a set if they are not. Play Mode holds a screen wake lock, so your device will not dim or sleep between or during songs, with no system settings to fiddle with.
And it works completely offline. Once your setlist is saved on the device, it plays from local storage with no connection. Stage WiFi that has no real internet behind it (a common situation with mixer networks) does not matter. Fretlist falls back to your local copy instead of waiting on a server. There is more on that in the offline chord sheet app post.
How do I read it from a music stand?
A sheet on a stand is a meter away, not in your lap, so Play Mode lets you size everything up. From Settings you can bump up the text size and line spacing, and you can drag a handle to make the control buttons bigger so they are easy to hit at arm's length. On a tablet in landscape you can also split a long song into two or three columns to cut down the scrolling. All of it is remembered per device, so your stage setup is ready every time you open it.
If you want chord shapes up there too, the Frets panel shows the diagrams for the section you are on and follows along as the song scrolls. See Introducing Frets for how those are built.
Playing as a band
Right now, Play Mode is a one-screen tool: your device, your setlist, your performance. For a band, that means everyone loads the same shared setlist and runs it on their own stand.
Sharing a setlist is already built in. You can share a setlist by link and let your bandmates import the whole thing, songs and all, straight into their own libraries, so the whole group is reading from the same set. There is more coming here specifically for bands, and this is where it will land. Check back, or get your set into Fretlist now so you are ready for it.
Getting set up for a gig
Build your setlist, set each song's key and capo the way you play it live, and pair your foot pedal before you leave the house. At the gig, open the setlist, tap Play Setlist, and play.
It is part of Fretlist, free during Early Access. For a full walk-through of every control, see the Play Mode guide. If you are still building the set, here is how to organize your setlists. And if you mostly use Fretlist at home, Play Mode is just as good for that: playing along while you practice.