Why I built Notes to Play

I’m a guitar player. For as long as I can remember, my songs lived everywhere except in one place.

A chorus in a notebook. A verse in a Google Doc. A riff on my phone, recorded in a parking lot so I wouldn’t forget it. The chords for the bridge on the back of something I probably threw away. Notebook to notebook, doc to doc, a recording here and a player there.

Every songwriter I know has a version of this. The idea isn’t the hard part. Keeping it, and hearing what it could become, is.

A loop is not a song

I tried loopers. They’re fun, and they’re great for jamming. But a looper repeats the same thing. A real song has a verse, a pre-chorus and a chorus. It goes somewhere, and the chords change when the words change.

So my choices were nothing at all, or a full studio: a big recording program, a mouse, a hundred menus, and an evening gone before I heard my chorus once. For a quick idea, that’s too much. For a real song, a voice memo is too little.

The option in the middle

That gap is why I built Notes to Play. It sits between the notebook and the studio.

Map the idea. Pick the chords, split the song into parts, and write the lyrics right under the bars they belong to.
Hear it out loud. Piano, guitar, bass and drums play what you wrote, so the song in your head is finally coming out of the speakers.
Improve it over time. Come back tomorrow, change a chord, add a bridge, try a different beat.
Take it anywhere. It runs on a tablet, a computer or a phone, and works offline.
Take it to the studio. When it’s ready, export it as audio or MIDI and keep going in your recording program.

The Notes to Play song view: a song split into parts, with chords and lyrics under each bar

Write for a band, even if you don’t have one

I want to be honest about what this is. Notes to Play isn’t trying to sound like a finished record, and it isn’t AI writing songs for you. It’s a place where you can imagine a band, write for a band, and then jam with what you wrote. You hear the whole idea of the song, not just your own part.

And you don’t have to be a player. All the instruments are laid out for you. The circle of fifths shows which chords belong together, and chords that fit your key light up, so you can build a song step by step and learn how songs work along the way.

The circle of fifths in Notes to Play, with the chords that fit the key highlighted

The guitars are mine

One personal detail. The guitar sounds in the app are my own guitars, recorded by me: a Taylor steel-string (strummed and fingerpicked), a Cordoba nylon-string, and a Fender Strat, clean, bright and with overdrive. When you write a guitar part in Notes to Play, those are the strings you hear.

Where it goes from here

Notes to Play opens to everyone on Saturday, October 24, 2026. You can start free, and every sound is included. I’ll keep building it the way it started: from the songs people are actually trying to write.

If you have a song stuck in a notebook somewhere, I built this for you. Come get it out.

Adam