Your instruments live in Settings → Account → Instruments. It is a short list: one row per instrument you play, each with the tuning you play it in. Fretlist uses that list in two places, and nowhere else.
What the list changes
Chord diagrams. A guitar chord and a ukulele chord are different shapes with the same name. Fretlist draws the shapes for the song's instrument, so a song written for ukulele shows ukulele grips, not guitar ones transposed by wishful thinking.
What a new song starts as. A new song takes its instrument and its tuning from the first row in your list, together. If your main is a ukulele in Standard, new songs start there. If it is a guitar in half step down, they start there.
Those two halves come from the same row deliberately. Taking the instrument from one place and the tuning from another is how a ukulele song ends up stamped with a guitar's tuning.
Adding an instrument
Pick from the list: guitar, bass, ukulele, mandolin, banjo, keys, drums, vocals.
Anything else, type it. A typed name that matches one of the above resolves to the real instrument rather than becoming a lookalike, so typing "Guitar" gives you a guitar, with its tunings and its chord library, not a text label that happens to say guitar.
For a stringed instrument that is not on the list, Fretlist asks how many strings it has and remembers it as, for example, Bouzouki (8). The string count travels with the instrument everywhere it is shown, shared songs included.
Chord libraries
Guitar and ukulele have full chord libraries, so Fretlist can draw any chord you name. Mandolin and banjo are recognised instruments with their own tunings and capo ranges, but their libraries are stubs: Fretlist will draw the shapes you write out yourself and tell you when it has none of its own to offer.
Keys, drums and vocals have no fret diagrams, for the obvious reason.
Tuning
Each row carries its own tuning. Pick a preset, or type your own: Open C, whatever you actually use.
Two kinds of tuning behave differently, and it is worth knowing which is which:
- Pitch shifts: half step down, whole step down. Every string moves by the same amount, so the shapes stay the same and only the sounding pitch changes. Fretlist can account for these, because the maths is a straight shift.
- Shape tunings: Drop D, Open G, DADGAD. These rearrange the strings, so the shapes themselves change. They are a voicing layout, not an offset, and Fretlist treats them as such rather than pretending they shift your key.
Order matters
The first row is your primary. Drag to reorder.
Primary decides what new songs default to. Everything below it is still yours and still selectable on any song.
An empty list is fine
A drummer or a singer has no chord instrument, and the list is allowed to be empty. Fretlist will not invent one: when a song does not say what it is for, it renders as guitar in standard tuning, which is a rendering fallback and not a claim about you.
Signing up pre-selects guitar to save the most common case a step. It is a row like any other. Remove it.