Documentation

Getting Started

Creating an account

Go to app.nitesong.io/sign-up and sign up with your email. You'll receive a confirmation email — click the link to verify your account.

Your first song

Once signed in, you'll land on the Songs page. Click New song to create your first one.

Fill in:

• Title — the name of your song
• Status — track where it is (Idea → In Progress → Finished)
• Key — the musical key and mode (major or minor)
• BPM — tempo in beats per minute
• Tags — freeform labels to organize your songs
• Desciption — any details about the song, inspirations, etc

Adding sections

Inside a song, click + in the tab bar to add a section (Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, etc.). Sections can be reordered by dragging the ⠿ handle on each tab.

Adding lyrics

Inside a section, click + Add lyrics to open the lyrics pane alongside your elements.

Adding elements

Elements capture notable parts of the mix — instruments, chord progressions, riffs, and more. Click + Add element to open the picker. See Elements for a full breakdown of how they work.

Song Structure

Overview

Everything in nitesong is organized around a three-level hierarchy:

Song
 └── Sections  (Verse, Chorus, Bridge, …)
      ├── Elements  (Guitar, Bass, Synth, …)
      └── Lyrics

Each level has a distinct role. Understanding how they relate makes it easier to build up a song from scratch.

Songs

A song is the top-level unit of work. It holds everything about a track in one place.

Each song has:

• Title — the name of the song
• Key — the musical key and mode (e.g. G Major, A Minor), used to power the chord editor and cheat sheet
• BPM — tempo in beats per minute
• Description — freeform notes about the song as a whole

Songs live on your dashboard. Click New song to create one, or click any existing song to open it.

Sections

Sections represent the structural parts of a song — Intro, Verse, Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Bridge, Outro, and so on.

• Sections appear as tabs across the top of the song editor
• Reorder them by dragging the ⠿ braille handle on each tab
• Add a new section with the + button in the tab bar
• Each section has its own independent set of elements and lyrics

Sections let you work on one part of a song at a time without losing context for the rest.

Elements

Elements are the musical building blocks inside a section — instruments, parts, and layers that make up the mix.

Each element is defined by two identity fields:

• Instrument type — the kind of instrument or track (Guitar, Bass, Synth, Vocals, etc.). This is the colored badge. Click it to rename it at any time.
• Title — a freeform label for this specific part (e.g. "Main riff", "Pad layer"). Click it to edit inline.

You can always change both the instrument type and title after creation by clicking directly on them.

To add an element, click + Add element inside a section. The picker shows instruments already used elsewhere in the song, a set of common suggestions, and a custom entry field for anything else.

See Elements for a full breakdown of chord progressions, colors, tags, and more.

Lyrics

Lyrics live inside a section alongside its elements. Click + Add lyrics inside any section to open the lyrics pane.

Lyrics are section-specific — each section has its own lyric input, so Verse 1 and Verse 2 stay separate.

Elements

What is an element?

An element is something notable in the mix — a guitar part, a synth pad, a bassline, a vocal hook. Elements live inside sections and are how you document the musical building blocks of a song.

Adding an element

Click + Add element inside a section to open the element picker. It shows:

• Used in this song — instrument names you've already added elsewhere in the song, listed first
• Suggestions — a default set of common instruments: Guitar, Bass, Synth, Rhythm Guitar, FX, Guitar Solo, Keys, Drums, Strings, Vocals, Pad, Lead
• Custom — type any name and press Enter or click "Create" to add something not in the list

Selecting or creating an instrument immediately adds the element card to the section with a randomly assigned color.

The element card

Each element card has two identity fields:

• Instrument (the colored badge) — the type of instrument or track, e.g. "Guitar". Click the badge to rename it inline.
• Title — a freeform label for this specific part, e.g. "Main riff". Click it to edit inline. New elements auto-focus this field with a placeholder.

Below the header, click the description area to add notes about the element. The text area expands automatically as you type.

Colors

Each element is assigned a color on creation, used for its card's left border and the instrument badge. To change the color, open the ⋯ menu → Edit and choose from 8 preset swatches.

Chord progressions

To add a chord progression to an element, open ⋯ menu → Add chords. This opens the chord editor where you build a progression specific to that element.

Picking chords

The chord picker shows every chord available in the song's key, ordered with the diatonic chords first — the chords that naturally belong to the key (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII). Below those, you'll find the remaining in-key chords including extensions and alterations (sevenths, suspended, added tones, etc.).

This ordering keeps the most harmonically "safe" choices at the top while still giving you access to the full palette when you want to reach outside the expected.

If your song has no key set, the picker falls back to a chromatic list. Setting a key on the song unlocks the full in-key ordering.

Building the progression

• Click any chord to add it to the progression
• Drag chords to reorder them
• Remove individual chords with ×
• Toggle Show cheat sheet to display the scale degrees and diatonic chord reference panel alongside the editor

The completed progression is displayed directly on the element card.

Tags

Tags can be added via ⋯ menu → Edit. They appear on the card and can be used to filter and organize elements across sections.

Minimize and expand

Click Minimize to collapse a card to a single compact row showing the instrument badge and title. Click Expand to restore the full view.

Duplicating elements

Use ⋯ menu → Duplicate to copy an element. The duplicate includes the instrument, title, color, description, tags, and chord progression.

Duplicating a section also deep-copies all of its elements and their chord progressions.

Key Cheat Sheet

What is the key cheat sheet?

When you set a musical key on your song, nitesong displays a cheat sheet showing:

• The scale notes for the key (numbered 1–7)
• The diatonic chords — triads and seventh chords with Roman numeral analysis
• The relative key (e.g. C major ↔ A minor)

On the song page

The cheat sheet lives in the right column of the song detail page alongside your song metadata. It stays visible while you work so you can quickly reference which notes and chords are in key without leaving the page.

In the chord editor

When adding chords to an element, the chord editor modal includes a Show cheat sheet button. Clicking it expands the modal to show the full scale and diatonic chord panel below the chord editor — so you can reference the key while building a progression without switching views.

Collaboration

Inviting a collaborator

Open a song you own and click the ⋯ menu → Collaborators. Enter your bandmate's email address and click Invite.

They'll need an existing nitesong account. Once added, they'll see the song in their Songs list marked as Shared.

Roles

Currently nitesong supports one collaborator role:

• Editor — can view and edit all song content including sections, lyrics, and elements

How editing works

nitesong uses a last-write-wins model — there is no real-time conflict resolution. If two people edit the same field at the same time, the last save overwrites the previous one.

In practice this works fine for small groups, but keep it in mind:

• Divide the work — have collaborators focus on different sections at the same time rather than the same one
• More than 2–3 simultaneous editors increases the chance of one person's changes being silently overwritten
• If you notice a change went missing, check with your collaborators — someone likely saved over it

Real-time multiplayer editing (with presence and conflict resolution) is on the roadmap.

Removing a collaborator

In the Collaborators dialog, click Remove next to the collaborator you want to remove. They'll lose access immediately.