Your Charts. Your Sets. Your Shows.

Overview

Welcome

What SureNotes is for, and the ideas that shape every screen in it.

SureNotes is built around one job: getting your band's charts, setlists, and show information onto an iPad, and keeping them reliable enough to trust on stage. Everything else — annotation tools, transposition, autoscroll, a Bluetooth pedal — exists to serve that one job.

Local-first, on purpose

Your library lives on your iPad first. SureNotes uses Apple's iCloud to sync your own data across your own devices, but it does not depend on a server SureNotes runs — there's no account to lose access to, and no outage on our end that can take your charts away mid-show. The tradeoff: SureNotes is the only copy of your data unless you make one yourself. Export a backup regularly — see Backup & Restore.

Nothing you already have disappears

Starter's limits (see Plans & Pricing) only ever stop you from creating more — a 6th song, a 2nd setlist, and so on. They never hide, lock, or delete anything you already built, even if you cancel a Pro subscription. A show you're already using stays fully playable.

The musician stays in control

SureNotes will warn you — about a missing chart, an unbalanced setlist, a song with no key set — but it will never rearrange your setlist or change your data for you. Every cleanup, merge, or bulk change asks for confirmation first.

Overview

Getting Started

The screens you'll use every day, and how they fit together.

Bands: your data, kept separate

A band in SureNotes is a private container for one project's songs, setlists, and shows — useful if you play in more than one group and don't want their libraries mixing. Add, rename, switch, or delete a band from Settings → Current Band. Starter includes one band; see Plans & Pricing for more. Today, a band is single-user — see Bands for what that means and what's changing.

Your music

Library & Importing

Every way to get songs and charts into SureNotes, from one file at a time to your whole binder at once.

Adding a single song

From Library, tap the Add (+) button and choose Import File. You can import a PDF, an image (photo of a chart), a plain-text file, or a ChordPro file. Pick Scan Document instead of a file to photograph a paper chart directly — SureNotes uses Apple's built-in document scanner to detect the page edges, correct the perspective, and let you review each page (keep, retake, or delete) before it's added as a normal PDF chart, ready for annotation and bookmarks like any other.

You can also import an audio file as a song's backing track.

Bulk-importing charts Pro

If you have a folder of charts to bring in at once, three tools handle different situations:

Finding songs

Library's search box matches title and artist. Use the energy and difficulty filters to narrow the list further — handy when you're building a setlist and want, say, only your highest-energy songs.

Library Cleanup

A reviewable list, not an automatic sweep — nothing changes until you confirm each item individually:

• Exact Duplicates — songs with matching title and artist (ignoring case and spacing).
• Possible Duplicates — near-matches that look like typos of each other, shown separately since they need a closer look before merging.
• No Chart Attached — songs with nothing playable attached yet.

Merging picks one song to survive; its metadata wins, and every chart, setlist placement, and rehearsal history entry from the other songs moves onto the survivor before the duplicates are removed — nothing is lost in a merge. A song currently used in an in-progress show can't be merged away.

Your music

Song Details

Everything stored about one song, beyond the chart itself.

Open any song to edit its full metadata — title, artist, key, tempo, time signature, energy, difficulty, and notes — and to attach additional charts or a backing track. Two things are tracked over time rather than as a single flag:

• Rehearsal status — a current flag for where the song stands.
• Rehearsal rating history — a dated, 1–5 star history, so you can see how a song has actually progressed rather than just its latest state.

Per-song default chart

If a song has more than one chart attached (say, a lead sheet and a stripped-down version), set which one opens by default in Performance Mode.

My Part

A per-device preference — set your instrument or role once, and Performance Mode automatically opens the chart labeled for your part on a song that has one, on that iPad specifically. Useful when different band members' iPads should default to different charts for the same song.

Your music

Reader

Where you view and mark up a chart outside of a live show — for practicing, preparing, or just looking something up.

Reader opens PDFs, images, plain text, and ChordPro charts (see ChordPro Charts for that format's own rendering and transposition tools). Tap anywhere on the chart to toggle the surrounding chrome away, giving the chart itself more room — the same gesture works in Performance Mode.

Cropping

Crop a PDF or image per orientation — SureNotes remembers a separate crop for portrait and landscape on each file, so rotating your iPad doesn't undo work you already did.

Annotation tools

A full freehand annotation toolkit is available on PDF and image charts:

• Freehand ink, highlighter, and eraser
• Move tool, to reposition something you've already placed
• Text annotations
• Stamps, shapes, and arrows — with resize and rotate
• Undo and redo

See Apple Pencil for gesture shortcuts (squeeze, double-tap) that speed up switching tools while annotating with a Pencil specifically.

Saved annotation presets Pro

Save a tool, color, and thickness combination under a name for one-tap reselection later — Save Current Style… to create one, Manage Presets… to edit or remove existing ones. Up to 8 presets.

Custom stamps Pro

Add your own text or emoji stamps (no image upload) via Add Custom Stamp… in the stamp picker — up to 12, shown in their own section above the built-in stamp set.

Bookmarks

Named jump points within a chart. On a ChordPro chart, SureNotes builds the bookmark list for you automatically from the song's own sections (verse, chorus, and so on) — nothing to place by hand. On a PDF or plain-text chart, place bookmarks yourself in Reader (not available in Performance Mode, to keep the live screen focused); quick-pick common names like Intro, Verse, Solo, Bridge, Coda, and Ending, or type your own.

Repeat Links

A hands-free way to jump around a chart mid-performance using your Bluetooth pedal, for things like D.S. al Coda, a repeated chorus, or skipping straight to the ending. Create a repeat link in Reader by marking a source point and a destination point (presets: D.S. al Coda, Repeat Chorus, Repeat Section, Skip to Ending, or a custom name). Once it's on the chart, an ordinary tap of your pedal's Next button still just turns the page as always — only a brief hold at an active repeat-link point jumps to its destination, shown live as a "Hold to…" capsule at the bottom of Performance Mode. ChordPro charts show the source and destination as colored badges right on the section headers; PDF and text charts show a marker at the exact point you placed. See Bluetooth Pedal & Keyboard for the pedal side of this.

Tuner

A chromatic tuner using your iPad's microphone — note name, octave, and how many cents sharp or flat you are, with an adjustable reference pitch (415–466 Hz) for orchestras or altered tunings. Because it listens through the built-in mic, it's most reliable somewhere reasonably quiet, not mid-set with a full band playing.

Choose between two display styles with the Gauge / Pulse switch: Gauge is a linear, color-coded cents meter (green/orange/red). Pulse replaces it with a shape that breathes at a rate tied to how far off you are — fast pulsing far from in tune, calm and steady once you're there — deliberately avoiding a sharp strobe-like flash, since that's uncomfortable to look at on a dim stage.

Your music

ChordPro Charts

SureNotes renders ChordPro-format charts natively — chords positioned above lyrics, non-destructive transposition, and formatting controls a plain PDF can't offer.

Import or paste a ChordPro file the same way as any other chart. SureNotes parses it and renders chords above lyrics; you can always view and edit the original source text.

Transposition and key

• SureNotes keeps the song's original key and your chosen performance key as separate, independent values — transposing for one gig doesn't touch what's saved for next time.
• Capo calculation works out the capo position and shape-key for a given performance key.
• Choose to display the sounding key, the shape key (what your fingers actually play with a capo on), or both.
• Set a sharps vs. flats preference for how chord names are spelled.

Layout and formatting

All of these live in Reader's Appearance menu on a ChordPro chart, and are remembered per song. Two-column layout automatically keeps tab notation full-width instead of squeezing it into a narrow column, since tab depends on precise horizontal alignment that a narrow column would wrap or shrink into illegibility.

Semantic annotations

Beyond freehand Pencil ink (see Reader), ChordPro charts support annotations that understand the chart's structure — a text note or highlight stays attached to the specific lyric line or chord you put it on, even after you transpose, change the capo, or resize the font, which freehand ink on top of reflowing text can't guarantee.

• Text notes, anchored to a lyric line or chord Starter
• Highlight a line, circle or arrow a chord, and saved short-cue presets like WATCH, STOP, 2x, SOLO Pro

Exporting to PDF Pro

Export any ChordPro chart, in either column layout, to a paginated PDF. Because the font size that reads best for scrolling on-screen isn't always right for a fixed printed page, PDF export uses its own separate font-size setting — decoupled from the on-screen size, defaulting to match it the first time you export. As you adjust the export font size, a live preview shows the actual paginated pages it will produce, accounting for whatever hide-chords, hide-lyrics, column, and bold settings are active. A one-tap Fit to N pages action finds the largest font size that still keeps the chart within a page count you choose (most often one page). You can also place a {new_page} (or {np}) directive in the chart's source to force a page break at a specific point.

Your music

Apple Pencil

SureNotes recognizes Apple Pencil's pressure, tilt, and gesture input wherever annotation is available — Reader and Performance Mode, on PDF and ChordPro charts alike.

Finger touches never trigger these gestures or affect stroke width, and SureNotes gives priority to whichever touch — Pencil or finger — actually landed first, so an incidental palm touch while you're drawing doesn't interrupt the stroke.

Saved presets and custom stamps (both Pro) are covered under Reader; shape drawing on Pro also snaps lines and arrows to clean 15° angles and squares/circles to true proportions as you draw them.

Planning a show

Setlists

Reusable running orders, built from your library.

Add songs to a setlist, then drag to reorder or remove them. Set a target duration for the set, and SureNotes shows a running over/under badge as you build it, so you can see at a glance whether you're light or long before you're on stage finding out. Duplicate an existing setlist as a starting point for a new one rather than rebuilding from scratch.

Planning a show

Shows

A real date, with its own frozen copy of a setlist and its own readiness checks.

Attaching a setlist

When you attach a setlist to a show, SureNotes freezes a snapshot of it at that moment. If you edit the source setlist afterward — reorder it, add a song, reuse it for a different gig — an already-attached show is not retroactively changed. This is deliberate: a show you already played, or are about to play, shouldn't silently shift under you because a setlist got reused or edited elsewhere later.

Preflight & Show Health

Before a show, SureNotes can check that everything it needs is actually in place and available offline — no depending on a venue's Wi-Fi. Reach this from Show Detail; the checks available depend on your tier, but they're all reached through the same screen.

Results show as Show Ready, Warnings, or Blocking Issues, each with a way to open and resolve the specific problem, then re-run the check. Show Health only ever informs — it never rearranges your setlist for you.

Calendar & export

Add a show to your device calendar with one-way export (editing the show afterward doesn't push updates back to the calendar entry). Export or print the setlist and show information as a simple PDF or plain text via the iOS Share Sheet, or copy it to the clipboard — song order, key, duration, BPM, optional/backup indication, and set/show totals are included by default.

Pro adds selectable columns, your band's logo, stage and song notes, custom headers and footers, saved export templates, CSV export, and fully branded PDF output.

On stage

Performance Mode

The full-screen, on-stage view of a show — built for hands-free use while you're playing.

Performance Mode steps through a show's songs in order, tracking your pace against each song's expected duration so you can see whether you're on pace, ahead, or behind without doing math mid-set. It never plays backing-track audio automatically — you start and stop playback yourself. Tap anywhere on the chart to hide the surrounding chrome, giving the chart the full screen; tap again to bring it back.

A song marked optional or backup shows a clear badge, so the band knows before you count it in whether it's a maybe.

Chart Appearance / stage lighting

Three presets — Normal, Dimmed, and Night — for reading charts comfortably at different stage-lighting levels. Customize Dimmed and Night further: how much to dim, whether to invert the chart's colors, and an optional warm color tone.

Quick Song

Search your whole library and open a song that isn't in tonight's show, without disturbing the show itself.

• Starter — open any song temporarily, then return exactly to where you were in the show. Nothing about the show's running order is changed. This still works even inside a read-only preserved show.
• Pro — insert the song into the running order after your current song, with the rest of the show's timing recalculated automatically; optionally save that revised order for good once the show's over; mark an inserted song as a request, feeding a per-band Recently Requested list (alongside a Recently Played list) that the whole band can see, not just whoever's holding the iPad. Both lists' retention window is adjustable in Settings → Quick Song (1–24 months, default 3).

Half-page turning & autoscroll

Alongside a normal full-page turn, Half Page Down / Half Page Up moves half a page at a time — useful when a full turn jumps too far. Works across PDF, plain text, and ChordPro, in both Reader and Performance Mode.

Auto-Scroll scrolls the chart continuously at a set speed, toggling to Stop Auto-Scroll while running, with pause and resume mid-scroll.

Pro — Autoscroll Settings… lets you set a target duration instead of a raw speed (SureNotes works out the right speed from the actual content and your screen), save separate settings per song — a shared band-default plus your own optional personal override — with a configurable start delay before scrolling begins, and fully independent settings for portrait vs. landscape.

Pro — turn on Pedal Controls Auto-Scroll in the scroll-control menu to repurpose your pedal's Next/Previous buttons for that song: start, pause, resume, and stop autoscroll instead of turning pages. It's off by default per song, so it only changes pedal behavior on songs where you've deliberately turned it on.

Tap zones

The screen is divided into left, center, and right tap zones. Center always toggles chrome. Adjust each side zone's width (10%–45% of the screen) with a live preview, or disable a zone entirely.

Pro assigns a specific action — Previous Page, Next Page, or Toggle Chrome — to each zone independently, with entirely separate layouts for portrait and landscape, optional double-tap/long-press actions per zone, and Tap Zone Profiles to save and switch between whole configurations by name.

Metronome & Count-In

A manual, one-shot count-in — it never starts on its own. A 5-second "Get Ready" bar counts down before the beat starts, shown as an actual beat number that follows whatever appearance preset is active. Tap the tempo live if you need to adjust it in the moment; this never overwrites the tempo saved on the song itself. Choose from 10 named count-in styles on each song's details — from a plain 4/4 count to a felt-in-two 6/8, a shuffle feel, or a slow-blues 12/8 with ghost-note subdivisions — each with its own distinct, audible click pattern; leave it unset for a plain classic "1, 2, 3, 4." Turn on an audible click (off by default, since it shares your iPad's speaker with any backing track) and, separately, have a song's backing track auto-start the instant the count-in ends. The metronome lives only in Performance Mode — it's built around the idea that the whole band is about to start together, which doesn't apply while reading alone in Reader.

On stage

Bluetooth Pedal & Keyboard

Hands-free page turning, for any Bluetooth pedal that emulates a keyboard (AirTurn, PageFlip, iRig BlueTurn, and similar) — plus a real external keyboard.

Pedal control scheme

Choose one next/previous key pair, applied identically across every chart type: Left/Right Arrow, Up/Down Arrow, Page Up/Page Down, or Space/Enter. A plain external keyboard's arrow keys work the same way automatically. This is a per-device setting — it belongs to the physical iPad your pedal is paired with, not to a band or show.

Custom pedal buttons Pro

If your pedal has extra buttons beyond next/previous, assign one directly to Toggle Auto-Scroll, Pause/Resume Auto-Scroll, Half Page Down, or Half Page Up — press the physical button once while assigning it, and SureNotes learns which signal it sends.

Pedal Profiles Pro

A profile bundles your control scheme and custom button assignments together, so switching pedals or setups is one tap instead of reconfiguring each piece separately. Save your current setup as a new profile, tap a profile to activate it, or update the active one after tweaking things. Your existing setup becomes a profile named "Default" automatically the first time you open this. Switching is manual — a profile doesn't yet auto-apply itself for a specific band or show.

Your data

Backup & Restore

Since SureNotes is local-first, this is how you keep a second copy.

Your data

Bands

What a band is today, and what's changing.

Right now, a band is a private, single-user data container — a way to keep more than one project's songs, setlists, and shows fully separate on your own iPad, synced across your own devices via your personal iCloud account. It is not yet a shared space other band members can log into and edit alongside you.

Real multi-person band collaboration — shared libraries, roles like Editor and Viewer, and a shared Band subscription tier — is planned but not yet available. See What's Next.

Reference

Settings Index

Every Settings row, in one place, with a link back to where it's explained.

Reference

Plans & Pricing

What each tier includes, and exactly where Starter's limits are.

Reference

Troubleshooting & FAQ

Common questions, and what to do about them.

A file from Google Drive (or another cloud provider) shows greyed out or won't open in a file picker.

This is almost always a brief sync delay on the cloud provider's side, not a problem with your file — wait about a minute and try again. If it's still stuck after that, restart your iPad; that clears a stuck system file-provider connection, which is the standard fix across every app, not something specific to SureNotes.

I cancelled a Pro subscription — did I lose anything?

No. Everything you already created remains exactly as it was and stays viewable. See Plans & Pricing.

Does SureNotes work without an internet connection?

Yes — that's the point of Preflight (see Shows): it confirms every file a show needs is already downloaded to your iPad before you're relying on it, so a bad venue Wi-Fi signal doesn't become a problem mid-set.

Can two band members edit the same show together right now?

Not yet — see Bands and What's Next.

I moved to a new iPad. How do I bring my library over?

If both devices are signed into the same iCloud account, your library syncs automatically. Otherwise, export a backup on the old device and restore it on the new one — see Backup & Restore.

Reference

What's Next

Announced, in-progress, or planned work — kept honest and short.

• Band collaboration — a real shared workspace: a shared library, setlists, and shows across band members, with roles like Editor and Viewer, and the Band subscription tier to go with it.