Play Mode is Fretlist's stage view: your song fills the screen as a large, clean chord sheet, with everything you need to perform tucked into a floating control stack and a slim header. It auto-scrolls in time with the song, or fits the whole song on the screen so nothing has to scroll at all. It keeps the screen awake, runs a metronome, shows your notes, chord diagrams and the song's sections next to the sheet, and moves through a whole setlist hands-free. It's built to be read at arm's length, on a stand, mid-gig.
Opening Play Mode
- From a song: open any song and tap Play Mode (the monitor-with-a-play icon in the action row).
- From a setlist: open a setlist and tap Play Setlist. This plays the whole set in order, so you can move song to song without leaving the stage view.
- On a keyboard: press P while viewing a song or setlist.
Play Mode opens as a full-screen layer over the app, so you never lose your place underneath.
Setlist context
When a song belongs to a setlist and you open it from that setlist, Play Mode carries the set with it: you get the same song-to-song navigation as full setlist playback (a song counter, chevrons, swipe, and the end-of-song pill). Open a standalone song that isn't part of a set and Play Mode is just that one song, with no navigation.
A night in more than one set
A setlist can be split into sets, and Play Mode knows about them.
The counter at the top names the set you are in and counts within it, so a three-setter of twelve reads Set 2 · 1/12 rather than 13/36. Tap it and the song picker is grouped the same way, with each set's songs numbered from one. A setlist with a single set says nothing about sets at all, because there is nothing to tell apart.
Step off the last song of a set and you land on a Break. It is a screen, not a message: it names the set coming up and the song that opens it, with the instrument and key you will read it in. Stay on it as long as the room takes. There is no timer, because a break ends when the band says so. Start Set 2 begins the next set; the arrows and swipe step off the break the way they stepped onto it.
On the setlist itself, each set header has its own play button, so you can start the night at set 2 without scrolling past set 1.
If Follow Me is on, the break reaches every device at once: when the person leading walks off, the whole band sees the same screen.
What's on screen
When Play Mode opens you see, from top to bottom:
- The chord sheet itself, rendered large in the performance font, with your saved transposition, capo, flats/Nashville choices, and chord/tab visibility already applied.
- A slim header across the top. In a setlist it shows a 1/12 song counter (tap it to open the full song list), with previous/next chevrons. When Fit splits a song into pages, it shows the page too (Page 1/2). On desktop it also carries a ? keyboard-shortcuts button and the close button; on a phone it has a small drag handle you can pull down to exit.
- The floating control stack in the bottom-right corner.
- A thin progress bar along the very bottom edge that fills as you scroll, so you can see at a glance how far through the song you are.
Auto-scroll
Tap the Play button (bottom of the stack) to start scrolling; tap again to pause. The scroll is buttery and sub-pixel smooth at any speed.
Smart speed is the default: Fretlist paces the scroll to the song's length, so a 3:10 song reaches the bottom in about 3:10 and you finish reading right as the song ends. A teal sparkle in the speed control means smart speed is active. Songs without a saved duration fall back to a calm default speed you can nudge.
While scrolling, a speed control (a gauge) slides in just above Play. Open it to fine-tune the pace, or tap the sparkle to snap back to smart speed. Once you reach the bottom, Play disables (it has nothing left to scroll); scroll back up and it's live again.
With Fit on, nothing scrolls, so there is no Play button: a song that fits shows whole, and a longer one turns its pages instead.
Fit the song to the screen
Fit shows the whole song on the screen at once. It picks the number of columns and the text size that fit the song, so you never have to scroll mid-song. It is for a tablet or a computer: it needs room for a second column, so on a phone (narrower than 768 pixels) it is not offered and the song scrolls as usual.
Turn it on with the first button in the Text popover (Fit to the screen, the button at the left), or with Fit the song to the screen (multi-column) under Fit to screen in the settings. It stays on for your account, on every device that is wide enough, until you turn it off (Stop fitting to the screen).
How Fit lays out a song:
- It only ever shrinks. Your own text size is the largest Fit will use, so a short song is never blown up. Fit picks the largest size, up to that, at which the whole song shows.
- Sections stay whole. A section is never split across two columns when it can be kept together. Only when keeping them whole would cost a page does Fit let a section carry on at the top of the next column, between lines. A chord line always stays with its lyric, and a heading never sits alone at the bottom of a column.
- Closer lines before a page. If you left the line spacing at its default, Fit tightens it a little before it splits a song into pages. Set the spacing yourself and Fit keeps yours.
- Chord grids and tabs stay whole. Fit uses fewer columns rather than wrap a grid's rows or a tab's lines. Only a grid too wide for the whole screen wraps, in a single column.
Pages
When a song would only fit at a size too small to read, Fit splits it into pages at a readable size instead. The header shows where you are (Page 1/2). Fit breaks between sections; a ChordPro {new_page} in the song always starts a new page.
To turn a page:
- The arrows in the control stack, which take the Play button's place (Previous page, Next page).
- Swipe up or down on a touch screen, or scroll with a mouse wheel or trackpad. One swipe turns one page.
- The keyboard or a foot pedal: PgDn, ↓, Space or . for the next page, PgUp, ↑ or , for the one before. Songs still change with ← and →.
Page keys stop at the first and last page, with one exception for page-turner pedals: PgDn on the last page goes to the next song in the set, and PgUp on the first page to the song before. A two-button pedal runs a whole set that way.
In the sidebar, the Sections list draws a dashed box around the sections on the page you are on, and Frets shows the chords of the whole page (Page 2 chords).
Fit's settings
With Fit on, two more settings appear under Fit to screen:
- Smallest text: the size where Fit stops shrinking and turns to pages instead, from 12 to 24 pixels (16 by default). Smaller, fewer pages lets a long song fit on one screen at a smaller size; Larger, more pages keeps it bigger and turns more pages.
- Max columns: the most columns Fit may use, up to what your screen is wide enough for (two on a small tablet, up to five on a large monitor). 1 means Fit never splits the song into columns, it only sizes the text.
Text size still works with Fit on: − and + make the text Fit picked smaller or larger, and Fit lays the song out again around it, in more pages if it needs them. Click the value to go back to Fit's own size.
The control stack
The floating stack in the bottom-right holds the controls you reach for on stage. From the top:
- Settings (gear): opens the setup sheet (below).
- Metronome: tempo, time signature, tap tempo, and a silent flash mode.
- Text (an Aa icon): a small popover with text size (
−/ value /+) and line spacing (−/ value /+). Click either value to reset it. On a tablet or computer it starts with the Fit to the screen button. - Auto-scroll speed (gauge): appears only while scrolling.
- Play / Pause: at the bottom, under your thumb. With Fit on it is gone, and a song with pages gets Previous page and Next page arrows in its place.
A curved drag handle rides the top-left of the stack. Drag it up or down to resize every control at once across five sizes, so you can make the buttons big enough to hit reliably on whatever device is on your stand. The size is remembered per device.
Settings (the gear)
The Settings gear opens a roomy sheet that slides up from the bottom; the chord sheet stays visible behind it so every change previews live. Dismiss it by swiping it down, tapping the ×, pressing Esc, or just using any other control.
- Show: a switch for each part of the sheet: Sections, Lyrics, Chords, Grids, Tabs, Comments and Notes, plus Sidebar (on a phone: Dock) if you use chord diagrams, which opens or closes the panel next to the song. Show all turns everything back on in one go. These are the same display settings as the song view. Notes covers the setlist note and your My notes. On a wide screen Notes also opens the sidebar, see The sidebar: notes, Frets and sections.
- Text size and Spacing: the same steppers as the bar's Text popover.
- Fit to screen: the Fit switch, with Smallest text and Max columns when it is on. See Fit the song to the screen. Not on a phone.
- End of song: show the end-of-song pill, pin it so it stays up all song, and (in a setlist) show its restart button. Advance to next song also only appears in a setlist: see the end-of-song pill below.
- Metronome: Click and Flash, see the metronome below.
- Follow Me: the same switch as in Settings, so you can turn it on or off without leaving Play Mode. See Follow Me.
Metronome
Tap the Metronome in the stack to start it. It uses the song's tempo, or 120 BPM in 4/4 if the song has none. While it runs, the button's fill pulses on every beat, brightest on the first beat of the bar. Tap it again while it runs to open its menu, and tap it once more (or Pause in the menu) to stop it. Tapping outside the menu closes it and keeps the beat going.
In the menu, set the tempo by clicking the BPM number and typing (30–300), or tap the Tap button four times to set it by ear. Click the time signature to edit it, and Reset to clear an override. The metronome is independent of auto-scroll, so you can click along whether the sheet is moving or not.
Under Metronome in the Play Mode settings (the gear), turn Click and Flash on or off: one, the other, or both. Flash lights a bar along the top of the song on every beat, brighter on the first beat of the bar. Flash on its own is a metronome only you can see, for playing live when the click would reach the PA. With a flash, Flash metronome for sets how long it runs: the Full song, or 8 bars, enough to catch the tempo; with Flash alone, the metronome stops when those 8 bars are up. These choices are remembered on this device.
The sidebar: notes, Frets and sections
Play Mode keeps three things next to the song, each in its own part of the sidebar:
- Notes: the setlist note, and in a band your own My notes. See Notes on your songs for every kind of note.
- Frets: if you have Frets turned on, the chord shapes for the part you're on, following your global Frets setting. See Getting the most out of Frets.
- Sections: the song's sections in order, to jump to any of them. See Jump to a section.
On a wide screen (a laptop, or an iPad in landscape) they sit in the sidebar down the right edge, each under its own heading, and stay in view while the song scrolls. Drag the sidebar's inner edge to resize it (Resize sidebar). The button in its top-right corner (Close sidebar) collapses it to a thin strip; click the strip (Show sidebar) to bring it back. With the sidebar closed, the notes move onto the sheet, above the lyrics. Press F to open or close the sidebar. If Frets is turned off in Settings > Features, there is no sidebar or dock, and your notes always sit above the lyrics.
Arrange the sidebar
The sidebar is yours to lay out:
- Move a part by dragging it by its heading (or, for Frets, any diagram). The places you can drop it light up while you drag: above or below the other parts. Let go anywhere over the sidebar and it lands in the place that is lit up, or at the top; if the sidebar was closed, it opens so you see where it went.
- Side by side: when the sidebar is wide enough, drag a part to the sidebar's far left or right edge and it gets a column of its own next to the others.
- Resize a part: drag the line between two parts (Resize) to give one more room. Each part scrolls on its own when it holds more than fits.
- The notes above the lyrics: drag the notes onto the sheet (Notes above the lyrics) to read them between the song's badges and its first line.
A grip (six dots) next to each part, and next to the notes above the lyrics, shows what can move. Until you have moved something once on a device the grips stay in view, faintly; after that they show when you point at the sidebar or the notes. With a mouse, just drag. On a touch screen, drag the grip, or press and hold anywhere else on the part for a moment until it lifts, then drag. Your layout is saved to your account, so it follows you to every device. More on the notes in Move your notes.
Hide notes, Frets or sections
Point at the sidebar with a mouse and an eye button appears next to each heading (Hide notes, Hide Frets, Hide sections). Notes above the lyrics get one too when you point at them. Anything you hide leaves a button at the bottom of the sidebar (+ Notes, + Frets, + Sections): tap it to bring it back. Hide everything and the sidebar folds to its strip; open it and it says Nothing in the sidebar., with the same buttons at the top.
Two switches in the gear's Show group do the same for the whole sheet:
- Notes hides your notes, on the sheet and in the sidebar. While the notes live in the sidebar, switching Notes on opens it.
- Sidebar (on a phone: Dock) opens or closes the whole panel.
Jump to a section
Tap a section in the Sections list and the song goes there: it scrolls to it, or with Fit turns to the page that holds it. The section lights up for a moment so your eye finds it. The list marks the section you are in; with Fit splitting the song into pages, a dashed box shows which sections are on the page you are on.
With Follow Me on, a section tapped on the leading device moves every following device to the same section.
On a phone or tablet
On a phone, or a tablet held upright, the panel docks along the bottom; drag the dock's handle to make it taller, or down to close it. Tabs at the dock's top-right choose what it shows: Notes, Frets or Sections. Your notes also sit above the lyrics, at the size of the lyrics, so you can read them from the stand. With Frets switched off, the dock shows your notes and sections only.
Moving through a setlist
In a setlist (or a song opened from one), several ways move you between songs:
- Header: the previous/next chevrons, or tap the 1/12 counter to open the full song list and jump to any song. With 10 songs or more, the list has a search field at the top for a title, an artist, a tag or a set name.
- Swipe: swipe left or right anywhere on the sheet.
- Tap the edges: on a touch screen, tap the left edge for the previous song or the right edge for the next.
- Keyboard / foot pedal: the arrow keys, or Page Up / Page Down. With Fit on, Page Up / Page Down turn pages first, see Pages.
The end-of-song pill
When you reach the bottom of a song in a setlist, a pill slides up offering the next song. How it moves on is your call, set with the Auto switch under Advance to next song in Settings:
- Auto off (the default): the pill waits. Tap it to move to the next song and start playing it. It's a deliberate "go," handy when you want to cue the next number yourself.
- Auto on: while you're auto-scrolling, the pill counts down and advances on its own, then keeps scrolling the next song. A stop button cancels the countdown, and you can tap the pill to skip ahead immediately.
A small restart button on the pill takes you back to the top of the current song (and resumes the scroll if you were scrolling). On the last song of a set, or a standalone song, the pill simply offers that restart.
The pin next to the pill keeps it on screen for the whole song instead of only at the end. Tap it again to unpin. Don't want the pill at all? Switch off Show end-of-song pill in Settings.
With Fit on, nothing scrolls to an end, so the pill comes up on the song's last page (on a song that fits on one screen, right away) and waits for a tap; it never counts down. A pinned pill on an earlier page names the next page instead, with the sections on it (Next: Page 2 of 2); tap it to turn the page.
Keyboard shortcuts and foot pedals
On a keyboard, press ? for the full shortcut list (the ? button in the header opens it too). The essentials:
- Space: play / pause auto-scroll (with Fit on: next page)
- ↑ / ↓: scroll up / down (with Fit on: previous / next page)
- , / .: previous / next section (with Fit on: previous / next page)
- [ / ]: scroll speed down / up
- + / -: font size up / down
- F: open or close the sidebar M: toggle metronome T: tap tempo
- → / ← or PgDn / PgUp: next / previous song (in a setlist)
- Esc: exit Play Mode
Foot pedals work through these same keys. Most Bluetooth page-turners send Page Up / Page Down, which step through the songs in a set (or scroll, on a single song). If your pedal lets you remap its keys, set them to . and , to jump between sections instead. With Fit on, the pedal turns the song's pages, and past the last page goes on to the next song, see Pages.
On stage
- The screen stays awake. Play Mode holds a wake lock so your device won't dim or sleep mid-song.
- It works offline. Once a song is saved on your device it plays in full with no connection, so a dead-zone stage WiFi is no problem.
- It's touch-free if you want. Between smart-speed auto-scroll, a foot pedal, and the auto-advancing end-of-song pill, you can get through a whole set without touching the screen. With Fit on, a two-button page-turner runs the whole set: pages first, then the next song.
- Your other devices can follow. Turn on Follow Me and the tablet on the stand opens whatever song you start on your phone, and flips when you flip.
Leaving Play Mode
Close Play Mode with the × (top-right) or press Esc. On a phone you can also pull down the handle at the top. Pulling down to close works on phones only: on a tablet or a computer the header has its own close button, so a pull down that was meant as a scroll never closes Play Mode by accident. If you were playing a setlist, you land back on the song you were viewing when you exited, with its link back to the setlist intact.
Related
- Follow Me: drive Play Mode on all your devices from one of them
- Notes on your songs: setlist notes, My notes and notes in the song, and where each one shows
- Getting the most out of Frets: the chord diagrams shown in the sidebar
- Chords over Lyrics and ChordPro: the two formats your chord sheets are written in
- Printing and exporting: a paper or PDF copy of the same chord sheet