bandcue

The chords scroll themselves, offline, and the whole band is on the same page.

Use it in a browser The same account and library as the app. Making and changing songs needs Pro.

bandcue is an Android app for musicians who read chord sheets from a phone on a stand. A guitarist on a stage has both hands busy and a phone on a stand. What they need is four bars ahead of where they are — and the three ways they get it today all fail in the same place. A browser tab needs signal, and a basement, a club with a metal roof and a festival field are exactly where there is none. A PDF never scrolls itself. Paper is honestly fine, until there are forty songs and a wind.

bandcue is the fourth way: your songs, on your phone, scrolling at the speed of the song.

Where the songs come from

bandcue never fetches anybody’s chord sheet on your behalf. There is no catalogue in it and nothing is downloaded in the background: every song in your library is one you put there, by one of five gestures.

• Share it in. Find the song in your browser, tap share, pick bandcue.
• Paste it. A chord site’s plain text or ChordPro — both are read, including the chords sitting above the words in columns.
• Open a file. .cho, .chopro, .pro, .crd, .txt — or a whole export, zipped. A SongbookPro backup opens complete, setlists and all.
• Type it. Half of a working band’s book is its own transcription, and the editor is made for it.
• Search a chord site, from inside the app. You type, a browser view on your own phone opens that site’s page, bandcue draws the results itself so you are not navigating somebody’s mobile site on a stand, and you read the one you picked. Nothing is kept until you say keep.

Getting songs in and changing them is what bandcue Pro is for; reading and playing every song you already have is free, with no account and no limit on how many (see below).

The scroll is set in time, not in speed

You tell bandcue how long the song runs, and the sheet divides its own height by that. Which is why a larger font, a rotation, a fold or a transposition that reflows a line changes nothing about how fast it moves — the distance changed, and the time it was given did not.

And where a sheet says how many bars each part has — from its bar lines, or written down once on a screen made for it — the time is spent where the music is: a solo of thirty-two bars over two lines is not scrolled past at the speed of a chorus of four over eight. The tempo can be tapped, or heard from the room through the microphone.

It counts you in, a finger takes it over mid-song and it carries on from where you left it, and it stops at the last line. Autoscroll is free and stays free: every sheet you have scrolls in the time you set for it, because an app whose one job is behind a paywall does not get installed twice. The scroll that follows the bars is part of Pro — it needs somebody to have said how long each part is, which is itself a piece of making.

The band’s book is a folder you already have

Point bandcue at a directory you sync — Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, whatever is already on the phone — and that folder is the book: one ChordPro file per song, readable without this app. There is no account, no membership and no server of ours in the way. Whoever can see the folder is the band.

Songs go in and come out when you tap, never behind your back, and a song already on your phone is never overwritten by one from the folder: two versions of the same song is a decision the band takes.

A backup in the cloud

The folder is still the design, and it is still what most bands should use. The cloud library is for the people who do not want to run one: an optional backup and sync, under your account, and part of bandcue Pro.

Assume we can read what you put there. A song is stored as the text you typed, with its title and artist. It travels over TLS and it sits on a disk we run, under your account — so a copy of the database would tell whoever had it what is in a library. That is a real trade and it is the one we made: syncing your own devices, a library a band shares, and a conflict that resolves instead of overwriting all need the service to hold a song rather than a box.

What does not change is the part that matters. Nothing here is public: no catalogue, no search across libraries, no browsing, and no way into a library except as the account it belongs to or as a member of the band that holds it. Nothing is ever fetched on your behalf — every sheet in bandcue was typed, pasted or imported by the person who put it there. What is sold is storage and sync, never content.

And if that trade is not one you want to make, the shared folder needs no account and no service at all. It is the older half of this app and it is not going anywhere.

On a stage

• Black paper, amber chords — the stage theme, readable at two metres under a light nobody chose.
• The screen stays on while a sheet is up, and lets go the moment it is not — or for the whole app, between the songs of a set, if you turn that on.
• Five switches for a phone on a stand: full screen, the screen kept on, the time in the corner the status bar was hidden from, where you are in the set, and the next song a press away. Off until you turn them on.
• Any HID page turner works: page up and down, the arrows, space — and the volume keys, which is the mode most pedals ship in.
• Hold a chord and it shows you where it is, on a guitar and on a ukulele.
• Setlists carry the running total against the length of your slot, which is the question a band actually asks a setlist.

What is free, and what Pro is

The line is one sentence: reading and playing are free, making and changing are what Pro is for.

Free, with no account and no limit on how many songs you keep: every sheet you have opens, scrolls in the time you set for it, transposes on screen, takes a capo and exports as ChordPro — and so does every sheet of every band you are in. The tuner, the metronome, the page turner and the band’s shared folder are free. Getting your songs out is free, all of them, at any time.

bandcue Pro is the making: the editor and every way of getting a song in, the scroll that follows the bars, notes anchored to the lines they are about, setlists you make and change, the cloud library on every phone you use, starting a band and playing a song together on stage, batch import, PDF attachments, the home-screen widget and the watch remote. A subscription that ends takes nothing away: your songs stay, still open, still scroll, still export. What ends is writing — and anything an install was already using before it was part of Pro stays with it.

Two more are designed and not built, and they are named here as such rather than sold: instrument-aware transposition, and a song’s history. The app’s own Pro screen says “Coming” against each of them.

Pro is never content: no song in bandcue came from us.

In the version served from the F-Droid repository there is no paywall at all, and the app asks for a donation once a week on a channel of its own.