What is Chordly?

For decades, making a chord sheet meant working in ChordPro: type the lyrics, put the chords in square brackets, add directives for structure, then run the file through a renderer just to see the finished page. Chordly replaces that whole workflow.

It's a full document editor built specifically for chord sheets and guitar tabs. You type directly into the page, drag chords from the palette onto the exact syllables they belong to, and see them appear above the lyrics instantly. The chords are fully formattable. So is the rest of the document. No markup. No render step. No separate tool between writing and seeing the result. It's also dramatically faster than the old ChordPro workflow because you're working visually from the start instead of writing markup, rendering it, then going back to fix it.

There are really three things that make Chordly different:

• You work in a live document, not in markup
• You place chords visually by dragging them where they belong
• You can format the page however you want, including the chords themselves

How chord sheets have worked since 1992

The standard format for writing chord sheets is ChordPro, a plain-text format created in 1992. It works like this: you type your lyrics, embed chord names in square brackets wherever they land, and use curly-brace directives to define structure.

{title: Wish You Were Here}
{start_of_verse}
[Am]So you think you can [E]tell
[G]Heaven from [D]hell
{end_of_verse}

Once you've written that, you run it through a separate renderer — a command-line tool, a desktop app, or a mobile app that understands the format — to see what it actually looks like with chords positioned above the lyrics. You're editing blind until you do.

ChordPro has its place, and a lot of guitarists still rely on it. Chordly still works with that format, and there is a dedicated ChordPro section in these docs for those workflows. But the format still comes with the same underlying limitation: you are authoring markup, not working in a live document. The workflow is slower, the formatting is limited, and even basic visual decisions take more effort than they should.

What Chordly does instead

Chordly gives you a live document instead. You type your lyrics directly into the page and drag chords from the palette onto the word or syllable they belong to. The chord appears above the text immediately. What you see while editing is the finished result, and getting there is much faster because there's no write-render-fix loop slowing you down.

The chord palette sits below the toolbar. It shows your recently used chords first and includes a search field so you can find any chord quickly. Hover over a chord and you'll see the fingering diagram. Drag it to your lyrics and it lands above the character you drop it on. Move it by dragging it again. Delete it with a single backspace when the cursor is on it.

The chords are fully formattable, just like the rest of the document. Change the font, adjust the size, pick a color, make them bold. The lyrics underneath have all the same controls. You can make a chorus look different from a verse, increase the font size for readability on stage, or color-code sections however you want.

That's the difference. Most chord sheet tools either render a ChordPro file or give you a plain-text editor with a music-specific veneer. Chordly gives you a real document editor designed around the way musicians actually work.

What else Chordly lets you do

Guitar tabs

The editor also has a tab staff: a full guitar tab notation environment that drops into your document as a block. You can mix chord sheet sections and tab sections in the same song, which is useful for arrangements that combine rhythm playing and lead passages.

Perform your songs

Every song has a Play Mode: a full-screen view designed for reading on stage or in practice. Autoscroll keeps the page moving at the speed you set so your hands can stay on the guitar. The built-in metronome gives you a click track, and you can transpose the chords in real time to match a capo position or a different key without editing the song itself.

Work with others

Songs can be shared with other Chordly users. You control whether they can view or edit, and changes in a shared editing session appear in real time.

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Where to start

The Quick Start gets you from a new account to a finished song in a few minutes. From there, the rest of the docs follow what you're doing:

• Chord sheets — adding, editing, and formatting chords
• Guitar tabs — the tab staff notation
• Editor formatting — fonts, colors, spacing, and page breaks
• ChordPro — the format, its history, and how Chordly works with it
• Play Mode — autoscroll, metronome, and transposing live
• Collaboration — sharing and real-time co-editing