Your first start: name your band and add your songs

Everything in Stage Friend lives in a band or project: your songs, your setlists and your gigs all belong to one, and its name sits at the top of the menu. So after a short welcome, where you tap Next, the app asks what to call it. The name field already says My songs, so you can keep that or type your own, pick one of the colours and choose Create & continue. If you play alone, or with whoever turns up with a guitar on a Friday, your own name or "My songs" works fine.

You can rename the band later on its band page with Edit profile (on a phone it's the pencil), and make more bands when you need them, one for the covers band and one for the duo, see Create a band. The free plan has two bands of your own, and bands others invite you to don't count.

Next comes the question the whole app is built around: What songs do you play? Search for a song by its title or artist, pick the version that matches how you play it, and Stage Friend fetches its chords and lyrics. The song lands in a list under the search and the search clears for the next one, so you can add the opening songs of your set one after another. On the free plan each song fetched this way uses one of your web imports, 40 to start with and 2 a month after that, see Imports on the free plan.

Once at least one song is in, Let's play! opens the first one, with the rest of the songs you added ready to swipe through. A short tour then shows the two things that aren't obvious at first: tap the screen to bring up the controls, where you start autoscroll, and tap the key at the top to transpose the whole song. The tour runs once on each device, and Skip ends it if you already know your way.

Maybe you want to look around before you commit to anything, or your songs are already in another app. Skip at the top closes the setup at any step and leaves you where you are, and on the songs step Explore on my own closes it and takes you to the start of the app. On a computer, clicking outside the setup or pressing Esc skips it too. A band you already named is kept, and nothing is lost: you can add a song whenever you like, see Add a song, or bring your whole library from OnSong, SongbookPro, BandHelper or Setlist Helper in one go, see Move from another app.

With a few songs in, the natural next steps are a setlist for your next gig or rehearsal, and autoscroll, which rolls the lyrics up while you play so your hands stay on the instrument. If you play with others, the band's owner invites the rest so everyone has the same songs; inviting takes Solo Pro or Stage Pro, see Invite a member.