About BandBinder · Windows · macOS · Linux available now - Android · iOS early access

Rehearsal-born. Stage-ready.

BandBinder is the songbook your band builds in rehearsal and plays from at the gig. It exists because those two things were never the same document, and every band pays for the gap.

Most songbook apps are built for the gig and assume the work is already done. The work is not already done. The work is Tuesday night.

Where it came from

Not a startup idea. A problem in a basement.

BandBinder started as a private tool one musician built for his own cover band, because the alternative was another rehearsal spent asking what key we do this one in.

It got used every week, by real bandmates who had no reason to be polite about it. Things that did not work got found immediately. Things nobody used got deleted.

That is still how it is built. The app has to survive a Tuesday rehearsal and a Friday night, and there is a band who will say so either way.

Then it was rebuilt properly and made cross-platform, because half of every band is on the other kind of phone. Windows, macOS and Linux are available now, with Android and iOS in early access.

What we believe

Four opinions the whole app is downstream of.

The songbook is built at rehearsal, not before it.

Your key, your arrangement, the verse you cut, the ending you argued about. That is the real chart, and it gets decided in the room. An app that only shows you the original song is handing you a starting point and calling it a destination.

A band is the customer, not five separate people.

One plan covers everyone. Bandmates join with a six-character code, free, with nothing to buy and no account to talk anyone into creating. Per-seat pricing quietly punishes you for having a full lineup, and asking four people to each go buy something is how a band tool dies in week one. You will never pay per member.

On stage, the network does not exist.

Performance Mode runs entirely off your own device. No signal, no login, no loading. Venue Wi-Fi is bad and you find out during the first song, so we assume it is not there at all rather than degrade gracefully and hope.

Your charts are yours.

You bring your own material in, from ChordPro, plain text, or PDF, and it stays your band's version to edit however you play it. We do not scrape lyrics sites, and there is no locked catalog you are renting access to.

What BandBinder is not

A short list we intend to keep short.

Not a social network. Your band is not an audience and there is no feed.

Not a DAW, a looper, or a tuner. Those apps exist and are better at it.

Not a gig-economy booking platform. We are not taking a cut of your gigs.

Not a subscription that holds your own charts hostage. The whole app is free forever on every device, and what you pay for is syncing and sharing across your band.

Every feature has to earn its place against the rehearsal-to-stage job. Most ideas do not, including plenty of ours. Saying no to those is the feature.

Who it is for

Cover bands juggling forty songs in five people's memories, none of them in the album key.

Worship teams rotating players week to week, where whoever is on this Sunday needs the same chart in the same key.

Originals bands whose arrangements change faster than anyone writes them down.

Anyone who has ever squinted at a phone taped to a mic stand and thought there has to be a better version of this.

Still rehearsing

BandBinder is actively built and used every week. If something is wrong, broken, or missing, we would genuinely rather hear it than not.

Download BandBinder Tell us what is missing

Curious how it works day to day? The user guide and blog go deeper.