If you are a guitar player or songwriter I think you will love the app MySongbook - Lyrics and Chords… I do. this little app helps you create, find, view and manage song chords and lyrics. It uses the ChordPro format to display chords. You can find free songs in ChordPro format all over the internet. Some of the best websites being Chordie.com and Ultimate-Guitar.com.

ChordPro format is a machine-readable songsheet syntax which is relatively easy on the eyes and fairly easy to edit when you get used to it. If you compare the first and second screencaps in the gallery below, you can get a feel for the syntax. I found this song on Chordie and many of the chords were wrong. For instance on the third love, _____ there was a G or G7, but to me the G13 sounds like the studio version of the song. MySongbook doesn’t necessarily know the fretboard shape of a G13. That’s because the ChordPro song file format comes with a large number of common chord grids, but not every chord is included… there are just too many chords! Good news is that, with a snippet of code, you can define custom chord grids to your songs so that when you click on a crazy chord like the G13, you can see the chord shape quickly and easily! Oh yeah, the code. Put this at the beginning of your song file:

{define: G13 base-fret 0 frets 3 5 3 4 5 3}

There are a few ways to use MySongbook. There are 3 tabs at the bottom of the screen. You can either create a new song from the “Artists” list or “Songs” list by pressing on the + button on the upper right part of the screen. The “Find New Chords” tab brings you to the search area. From here you can search the web for chord charts, quickly visit your bookmarks, and search Chordie.com and Google.com. Photo 7 in the gallery below shows the search page and photo 8 shows my bookmarks.

How To
I’ll do a search on Chordie.com from within MySongbook. First I type “The Beatles” in the search field because they are my favorite band of all time. The app finds different references to “Beatles” so we click the first link. The search results provide us with a long list of Beatles songs to browse through. I scroll down until I find “All You Need Is Love”. Now for my favorite part. If the song is ChordPro compatible you will see the little blue “Save Chords” button on the lower right go from being grayed out and to blue. Press the blue “Save Chords” button to save the song chord chart to your iPhone. Easy as that. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that MySongbook searches the web for these chord charts and virtually anyone with a text program can make a chord chart… so they are definitely not all accurate/professional. But some songs are perfect and all of them can be edited after they are downloaded to your iPhone. And for the songs that are not accurate… we’ll just have to fix the chords and lyrics where we see fit. That’s one of the great things about Mysongbook!

Really, this little app has so many nice little touches that it’s hard to list them all so I’ll grab some bullet points from the app’s iTunes page.

Main Features:

• Finding New Chords from within the app using the built-in browser and search function
• Support ZIP files for automatically adding multiple ChordPro files
• Supports landscape mode for better viewing
• Auto Scrolling for playing along with the song
• Chord Diagrams just by tapping on chords
• Transposing Chords
• Basic Editing & Manually typing of song’s chords
• Right-To-Left support (defined per song)

Bulk Import
The app claims to import a large number of ChordPro files if you so happen to have a bunch. I have a few hundred that I have created over the years. I zipped them all up, uploaded the zip file to my server and then simply typed the url into MySongbook’s internal browser… all the songs loaded without an error! Awesome!!! That would’ve taken me forever to add one song at a time. Now I have all my songs with me in my pocket!

Gallery

Overall, MySongbook is definitely a great value for the money. You can easily create, find, edit, manage, songs in ChordPro format (and text format) with minimal fuss. The developer has plans for future updates that will surely make this app even better. Here’s a few words from developer Or Sharir:

While I believe that the current release satisfies my basic needs, I already have plenty of ideas that would satisfy the needs of those who want more than just playing along to their favorite songs. A few of them:

1. Visual Editing Of Songs - basically more touching less typing – making typing in brand new chords simple and fun.
2. Learning Mode - a special way of displaying songs as to help those who have just began learning to play - think of a kind of karaoke for guitar players.
3. Playlists - For those who like performing, it would be possible to create playlists on the go, reorder the songs, set delay between songs and more to help your show
4. Transposing Chords - added v1.1
5. Better Integration With Chordie.com - Like downloading your personal songbooks from chordie.com, and saving them as playlists.

Verdict
Pros: Tap on chords to view guitar chord shapes!, supports ZIP files for adding numerous ChordPro files, auto Scrolling to play along with song, bookmark favorite artists, chord transposition

Cons: I don’t particularly like the font or drop shadow used on the titles… not a fan of the title color either. There has got to be a better way to enter chords, edit code, etc. I’m sure Or will figure it out. Small gripes.

Features I Would Like To See: Fingering support so that this code will work: {define: G13 base-fret 0 frets 3 5 3 4 5 3 fingers 1 3 1 2 4 1}

7/10

:: App Store Page :: $1.99
:: Web ::