CardinalThe chart you find is never the chart you play.
Cover bands transpose for the singer, cut a verse, rewrite the ending. Cardinal is where your band keeps the version you actually perform — on every phone, working offline, readable on a dark stage.
Everything about using Cardinal is free — unlimited songs, setlists, bands and the whole stage view. Pro is $4.99/mo for photo import and PDF attachments.
One song, three lives.
Paste what you found. Cardinal reads the chords off it — no model, no guessing, no network. Then you make it yours, and that is what everybody reads on stage.
Am C There is a house in New Or- D F leans, they call the Rising Am C E E Sun, and it’s been the ruin
Chords over lyrics, ChordPro, or bar lines — pasted straight out of a browser tab.
Nothing is written until you tap Save. What it couldn’t be sure of, it says out loud.
The band’s transpose is shared. Your capo is yours alone, on your phone.
Sized to be read at arm’s length, in the dark, mid-song.
A red night-vision scheme that doesn’t blow your eyes out on a dark stage, and doesn’t light up the front row either. This is the whole reason the app exists.
Four ways in. Only one of them is typing.
Every chart in Cardinal is grounded in something you supplied. Nothing is recalled from a model’s memory — we measured that idea and it was wrong four times out of five.
| C | Am | F G | [C]Amazing [F]grace C Am lyrics underneath
One library. Five phones. No group chat full of PDFs.
Invite the band by email and everyone opens the same arrangement — your cuts, your key, your ending. Not the version somebody found online on the way to the gig.
Bands are free, and always will be. It is the only thing that makes a shared library worth having.
We charge for what costs us money to run. Nothing else.
Capping songs or setlists or bands would cost us nothing to lift and would only ever punish the bands using it most. So we don’t.
- Unlimited songs and setlists
- Create and join bands
- All of Perform mode — every scheme, every text size
- Paste, iReal Pro import, transpose, capo
- Three photo transcriptions, and viewing any attached PDF
- Unlimited photo transcription — every one costs us a model call
- Attach PDFs to songs — every one costs us storage
That’s the whole list. If a feature costs nothing to serve, charging for it would just be a tax on the band using Cardinal most.
Before you download it
Yes. Charts are cached on the device, so a basement green room with no bars changes nothing. Attached PDFs are the exception — those need a connection the first time.
Paste the share link and the whole playlist arrives as a checklist. Charts with nested repeat blocks are the known gap — about three in forty.
No. Pasting and iReal import use no model at all. The one model in the product reads a photo you took, and it lists what it couldn't make out rather than filling the gap in.
Yes, on every tier. A shared library is the point of the app; putting it behind a card would defeat it.
Play the gig. Not the admin.
Free on iOS and Android. Your first chart is a paste away.