How do you keep all your guitar chords in one place?
Keep one list of the songs you actually play, with each song's chords saved as text on your phone rather than bookmarked. Bookmarks, screenshots and notes scatter a songbook across three apps, and a bookmark is only as good as the page behind it, which moves, fills with pop-ups and needs a signal you may not have. One list, one saved copy per song, in a form you can transpose and read offline, is the whole trick.
Why
A songbook is only useful if it is complete in one place at the moment you need it, which is usually with a guitar in your hands and no time to search. The chords you use come from many sites and many languages, so a songbook tied to one site's catalogue is never complete, and a pile of links is never in one place. What works is your own list, of your own versions, kept where you play.
What it does
- Start with the ten songs you always end up playing, not the hundred you might.
- Save the version you actually play, from whichever site has it right.
- Keep the chords as text, attached to the words, so they can be transposed and resized.
- Add a song the moment someone asks for it and you have to look it up.
What it deliberately does not
- Bookmarking pages and trusting they will still be there, and still say the same thing.
- Screenshots of chord sheets: you cannot transpose a picture, or search it.
- Splitting the songbook by where the chords came from.
- Waiting to organise everything at once. It never happens; adding one song at a time does.
What that leaves behind
House of the Rising Sun Traditional
- There Amis a Chouse in DNew OrFleans
- They Amcall the CRising ESun
- Found
- under H, in the Songs tab
- Saved from
- the page you picked
- Needs a signal
- no
Related questions
How many songs should a campfire songbook have?
Fewer than you think to start with. Thirty to fifty songs you can actually play will carry most evenings; a list of three hundred you half know makes choosing harder, not easier.
Is it worth keeping songs in different languages together?
Yes, if you play them in the same evening. A songbook sorted by title with a language filter lets you keep everything in one list and still narrow it down when the group wants songs in one language.
Read next
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How do you save chords from a website to use offline?
Save the text of the chord sheet, not the page.
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What should you play at a campfire when your mind goes blank?
Look at a list of titles, not at a search box.
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How do you transpose chords to fit your voice?
Move every chord up or down by the same number of semitones until the highest line of the song sits where you can sing it without straining.