Paste any chord sheet. Transpose, pick a capo, see the chord diagrams, hit auto-scroll. Play. That's the whole tool.
GoChords is a chord-sheet reader for people who actually play. You paste a song — from anywhere, in almost any format — and it parses out the chords, lyrics, and section labels. Then you can transpose up or down, drop a capo on, and read while it scrolls.
[Am] inline, {Am}, (Am), chord-above-lyric layouts, Ultimate-Guitar paste, bar-lines, N.C., repeats. Auto-detects [Verse] / [Chorus] section labels.There's no account, no backend, no sync layer. Your songs and preferences live in localStorage. Open the app on a different device and you start fresh. That's by design — the app should outlive any hosting decision, and your library should belong to you, not to a database I'm paying for.
Every chord-sheet site I've used is bloated with ads, paywalled features, or designed for the wrong device. I wanted one page that does the four things I actually need — paste, transpose, see chords, scroll — and nothing else. So I built it.
I was sitting with a guitar trying to play a song from a tab site, getting interrupted by autoplay videos and consent banners. The frustration was specific: the actual job — show me the chords, let me transpose, scroll while I play — is small. The tool around it was huge.
So I described what I wanted to Claude Code: a single page that parses any reasonable chord-sheet format, transposes with capo math correct, draws the chord shapes on a canvas, and auto-scrolls. Local-only. No login.
The first version went up in an afternoon. Most of the work since then has been parser edge cases — every chord sheet on the internet uses a slightly different format, and the parser has to handle all of them gracefully. Bar-lines, N.C. markers, repeats, multi-artist credits, inline vs. above-lyric chord placement — each one a small fix.
Mobile took a second pass: chord-and-lyric pairs need to wrap together (not split mid-pair), the scroll-speed control needed a proper slider, the header needed to shrink. Sticky chords keep the current chord visible while the rest scrolls past.
"The right tool for the job is the smallest one that does the job."
The roadmap is short and pragmatic — better strumming pattern rendering, more chord shapes in the diagram database, optional song-library export/import so people can move their songs between devices without giving up on local-first. If you use it and there's a song format the parser chokes on, send it to me.
The whole app is a static build. Parser, transpose engine, chord-shape DB, canvas renderer — all client-side. Songs persist in localStorage. The only network call is the one that loads the page.
Got thoughts?
A song the parser can't handle? A feature you'd actually use? Tell me — no account needed.