How it works
Three things have to be true for a chord app to be worth opening at a campfire: getting a song in must be quick, what comes in must be what was on the page, and the song you want next must be easy to find when your mind has gone blank.
One
Find the chords, from any page
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Search for the song
Type the song and the artist. The app opens its own browser on a web search for its chords, with the address bar and back button of an ordinary browser.
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Pick the page you trust
Open any result, on any site, in any language. The page loads on your phone like any other visit. You choose the version; the app never picks one for you.
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Tap "This is it"
The text of that page is cleaned up into a chord sheet: ads, comments and menus dropped, chords placed over the words they sat above. Nothing is added that was not on the page.
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Check it, and it is yours
The result opens the way it will play. "Looks right" saves it on your phone for good; "Try again" goes back to the browser; "Edit" lets you fix a chord first.
Already reading a chord page in Safari or Chrome? Share it to Campfire Chords and it opens in the app's browser, ready for "This is it". And if a page is laid out so strangely that the whole of it will not read, select just the song on the page and tap "This is it" again: only the selection is used.
Two
Cleaned up, never made up
A language model is good at tidying a messy page and bad at knowing when to stop. So it is only allowed to tidy.
The page text goes to our server, which asks Google's Gemini to rewrite it as a chord sheet: the chords placed inline over the words, the verses and choruses labelled, the ads and navigation dropped. It is told to use only chords and lyrics that appear on the page, and to say so when there is no chord sheet there at all.
Then the result is checked against the page it came from. Every lyric line has to be found in the original text; a line that is not there is taken out, and the preview tells you how many were. Chords that do not read as chords are dropped the same way. If too much of the result fails, it is refused rather than patched. All of this happens on our server, before anything comes back to your phone.
Oh! Susanna Stephen Foster
- I Ccome from Alabama with my Gbanjo on my knee
- From
- the page you picked
- Lines not on the page
- taken out
- Next
- Looks right, Try again or Edit
Three
Pick the next song, and play it
The hardest moment at a campfire is not reading the chords. It is remembering what you know.
The Songs tab lists every title alphabetically, a letter per section, in large type that is fast to scroll. Search reaches titles, artists and the words of the songs; filters narrow it to one language or to what you have not played in the last thirty days. The app never recommends anything. Seeing the titles is what jogs the memory, and you pick.
Set lists hold the plan for a night: add songs, drag them into order, and swipe from one song to the next while you play. A built-in "All songs" list is always there, and any list can be played shuffled. History notes what you played, night by night — a song counts once it has been on screen for a minute with the app in front, or as soon as you start auto-scroll, so checking a chord does not count.
It takes about thirty seconds to try
Search for the song you always get asked for, pick the page, and tap This is it.
Free to start. No account, no advertising, and nothing to sign up for.