Songs

Songs is where the actual learning happens. Everything else in the app — the tuner, the practice tools, Jam — exists to support what's sitting in this tab. If you only ever use one part of Bass Buddha, it's probably this one.

Building your library

Open the Songs tab and you're looking at a searchable list of everything you've added, favorites pinned above the rest. Three filter pills — All, Recent, Favorites — keep things manageable once the list grows past a screen or two. Haven't added anything yet? The empty state hands you straight to the add-a-song flow instead of leaving you staring at nothing.

Adding a song

Tap Learn a song from Home, or the + in the Songs tab, and you've got four ways in:

• Level-tailored suggestions — a starting list shaped by the skill level you set during onboarding.
• Catalog search — search by title or artist. A match auto-fills chords and key, so you're not typing any of that in by hand.
• Songs you can play — the interesting one. Tap the chords you already know and the app searches the catalog for songs built from them. Each result comes back either flagged ready to play or badged with the one or two new chords standing between you and playing it — a genuinely useful way to find your next song rather than picking one and hoping.
• Manual entry — for anything not in the catalog. Type the title, artist, and chords yourself.

The song page

Every song opens to the same layout: a chord grid across the top, key and BPM underneath, and the full chord sheet below that.

Tap any chord in the grid for its full diagram and a play button — useful for checking a fingering before you commit to it mid-song. The transpose stepper shifts the whole song up or down a semitone at a time, with a one-tap reset back to the original key. Simplify chords does something similar in a different direction — it swaps harder chord names (slash chords, extended 7ths) for the plain triad or power-chord version, so whatever you're targeting through the song gets easier to land, without the song changing in any way a listener would notice.

Below the chords, a small bass fretboard diagram shows the scale that matches the song's key, with a toggle between the full scale and its pentatonic box — handy if you want to solo over the song later without leaving the page to work it out. Links out to YouTube and Ultimate Guitar sit near the top for when you want to hear the original or cross-check a chord you're unsure about.

Chord sheets and tab

If you've got a full chord sheet, a lyric sheet with chords marked above the words, or a proper 4-line bass tab copied off a site like Ultimate Guitar, you can bring the whole thing in rather than just the chord names. Paste it in, or point the camera at a printed or handwritten sheet: on-device text recognition reads it and sorts out what it's looking at automatically — chords over lyrics, a standalone chord list, or tab notation with one line per string.

Once it's in, the sheet displays however it came in — lyrics with chords riding above them, or a proper tab block you can read note-for-note — every chord still tappable for its diagram, plus a teleprompter mode: auto-scroll at one of four speeds, so you can read hands-free while you're actually playing instead of stopping to scroll.

Need a copy on paper, or want to send one to someone? Export as PDF renders the chords, diagrams, and any imported sheet into a printable document through the system share sheet.

Practicing a song

Tap Practice from a song's page and it opens a focused companion built around that one song: a running session timer up top, then a grid of tools — tune up, metronome already set to the song's tempo, the chord sheet, a groove drill built from the song's chords, a link into playing along with the full band, and a record button — all without leaving the song. It's the difference between practicing a song and practicing in general.

Recording takes

Record yourself playing a song and it's saved as a take — trim it with handles on either end, play it back, and mark your favorite as best so it's easy to find later. The song page shows your two most recent takes right there, with a link through to the full list when you've built up more than that.

Setlists

Building a set for a gig, an open mic, or just a focused practice session? Setlists are ordered, named lists of songs — create one, name it, reorder songs by dragging, rename or delete it later. Tap any song inside a setlist and it opens exactly like it would from the main library — a setlist is just a view into songs you already have, not a separate copy of them.