Oyoroi Jam User Guide

Last updated August 20, 2026 · covers version 1.2

Most pop and folk songs cycle through a small fixed set of chords. A guitar gives you six strings and a fretboard to find four of them on; a piano gives you eighty-eight keys. Oyoroi Jam gives you the four, as pads big enough to hit without looking.

That is the whole idea, and everything below is built on it. The app ships with fifteen public domain songs so there is something playable the moment you open it, and you can add your own by building them in the editor or importing a chord chart.

Never played an instrument? Start with the Quick Start instead. It gets you playing an actual song in about five minutes and skips everything on this page.

Your library

The first screen is your song library. Each row shows a song's name, how many chords it uses, and its genre. Above the songs sit the four things that are not songs: the Drum Kit, Jam in a Key, Jam Session, and Setlists.

The + button creates a new song or imports a chord chart. The button beside the gear controls how the list is arranged: sort alphabetically, by date added, or by recently played, and filter to favorites or to a single genre. Songs can also be grouped under genre headings. There is a search field pinned to the bottom of the list for when the library outgrows a screen.

Playing a song does not count as editing it, so opening one never reshuffles an alphabetical list under you.

The Oyoroi Jam song library, listing songs with their chord counts and genre tags, above shortcuts to the Drum Kit, Jam in a Key, Jam Session, and Setlists. — The library, with the fifteen bundled public domain songs.

Jam in a key, without a song

Everything above assumes you have a song in mind. Often you do not, and the rest of this page is no help at all when what you want is to make a noise and see what happens.

Jam in a Key, on the library screen, is the answer to that. Pick a key and a mode, major or minor, and the app lays out the eight chords that key is built from, in the order a keyboard climbs rather than alphabetically. Every one of them belongs in that key, so there is no wrong pad: anything you play against anything else will sound like music, which is the whole point of starting here rather than with a blank song.

The chords are labelled by degree on the picker, i, iv, v and so on, for anyone who wants to see the shape of the key. The pads themselves are labelled with chord names only, because a degree label is useful while you are choosing and clutter while you are playing.

Nothing is saved unless you ask. Play until you find a progression you like, tap Save, and it becomes an ordinary song in your library that you can rename, edit, practice, and put in a setlist. Walk away without saving and nothing was added.

The Jam in a Key screen with G Major chosen, showing the eight chords of the key labelled by degree, above a Start Jamming button. — Pick a key. The chords follow.

Playing in G Major, with the key's eight chords as full-width pads and a Save button in the header. — Playing in G, with Save waiting if you want to keep it.

Playing the pads

Open a song and you get one full-width pad per chord. There are two ways to play a pad, and you can use both in the same song.

Tap it and the whole chord sounds at once, the way a piano player drops a hand on the keys.
Swipe across it and the notes arrive one after another, the way a pick crosses the strings. Swiping left to right gives you a down-strum, right to left an up-strum, and how far and how fast you swipe changes how spread out and how hard the strum lands.

The pads fill whatever screen they have. A song with a few chords gets tall pads down a single column; a song with more than fits goes to two columns rather than shrinking away, and only a genuinely long song scrolls. When the pads do fit, they sound the moment your finger lands rather than when it lifts, which is the difference between an instrument and a button.

A held pad can be stopped by the hand that started it. Hold a chord for a moment and lift, and it damps; tap it and let go, and it rings on. Change to another chord while you are still holding the first and any notes the two chords share keep ringing instead of being struck again, so a change can be smooth rather than a fresh attack every time.

Long songs scroll normally. A pad only commits to a strum when your finger travels mostly sideways, so a vertical flick that happens to start on a pad scrolls the list instead of sounding a chord.

The chord player for House of the Rising Sun, showing five full-width chord pads labelled Am, C, D, F, and E. — Five pads is the entire instrument for this song.

How hard you play, and the three pad modes

Where you land across a pad sets how loud the chord is. The right half plays at full strength, and the further left you tap the softer it gets, down to a genuine murmur. Two thirds of the pad being full strength is deliberate: it means the quiet end is somewhere you have to reach for on purpose, so a wide dynamic range costs you no accuracy on an ordinary tap. It is the closest thing a flat piece of glass has to touch sensitivity, and it stops a repeated chord sounding mechanical. If you would rather every tap came out at one volume, switch off Velocity by Touch Position in Settings.

Settings offers three ways for a pad to read your finger, and the choice applies everywhere.

Tap and Strum is the default described above: tap for the whole chord, swipe to strum it.
Tap Only ignores swipes entirely, making the pads completely literal. They play when tapped and stay silent while you scroll past them. Worth trying if you mostly tap and want the chord list to behave like an ordinary list.
String Crossing sounds the chord one note at a time as your finger passes over each one, in real time rather than as a fixed sweep. Drag slowly and you get an arpeggio; drag quickly and you get a strum. It is the closest the app comes to the feel of crossing actual strings, and it rewards a slow hand.

The Chord Pads section of Settings, offering Tap and Strum, Tap Only, or String Crossing Strum, with a Velocity by Touch Position switch below. — Chord Pads, in Settings. The choice applies to every song.

Instruments

The instrument button in the player's bottom bar switches what the pads sound like: Acoustic Guitar, Electric Piano, Synth Pad, Organ, Bell, or Bass. Every sound comes from a General MIDI soundfont bundled inside the app, so none of it needs a network connection.

Bass is the odd one out on purpose. Rather than playing the full chord an octave down, it plays the root note alone, which is what a bass player would actually do. That makes it the right choice when you are the low end of a jam session and someone else is holding the chords.

Instrument is a single app-wide choice rather than a property of each song, so switching to Organ and moving to the next song keeps you on Organ.

The room they play in is a separate choice, under Acoustics & Reverb in Settings: Studio Dry, Warm Hall, or Spacious Arena. It scales each instrument's own sense of space rather than flattening them all to the same setting, so Bass stays close and dry while a Synth Pad keeps its air, whichever room you pick. All six instruments also sit at matched volumes, so changing instrument changes the sound and not the level.

The instrument menu open over the chord pads, listing Bass, Bell, Organ, Synth Pad, Electric Piano, and Acoustic Guitar. — Six instruments, chosen from the player's bottom bar.

Recording what you play

The record button in the player's bottom bar captures what the app is playing, with a timer running beside it so you know how long you have been going. Tap it again and the recording stops and offers itself to the share sheet, which is where it goes to Messages, Voice Memos, Files, AirDrop, or anywhere else that takes an audio file.

It records the app's own output rather than the microphone, so the room you are sitting in does not end up on the take and the app never asks for microphone access. Nothing is uploaded: the file sits in temporary storage until you send it somewhere or discard it. It is meant for catching a progression you just found before you forget it, which is the moment a full recording setup is least likely to be running.

Changing key, and the capo

The tuning fork button transposes the whole song, from six semitones down to six semitones up. Positive shifts are labelled the way a guitarist would think of them, so +2 reads as Capo 2.

The pads relabel themselves immediately, and each keeps a small reminder of what it used to be, so a pad reading Bm (orig. Am) tells you both what you are playing and where you started. Nothing about the song is rewritten: leave the screen and come back and you are in the original key again. This is for matching a singer or a recording on the spot.

The Key Transposition and Capo menu listing shifts from minus six to plus six semitones. — Minus six to plus six semitones.

The same five pads at Capo 2, now reading Bm, D, E, G, and F sharp, each showing its original chord in smaller text. — At Capo 2, with the original kept in view.

Building and editing a song

Tap Edit in the player to open the song editor. A song is a title, a genre, an optional key, an optional practice tempo, and an ordered list of chords.

Smart Harmonic Helper. Set the song's key and the editor offers the chords that belong to it, each labelled with its degree: i, iv, v and so on. Tap one to add it. This is the fastest way to build a song you are working out by ear, and the degree labels make the shape of the key visible while you do it, which is worth more than the shortcut itself if you are still learning where chords come from.

Each chord row lets you set its root and quality, hear it with the play button, and delete it. Two further controls sit underneath. Voicing chooses root position, first inversion, or second inversion, for when the default stack of notes sits too high or too low against the chord before it. Bass plays a different note underneath the chord, which is how you write a slash chord such as C/G.

Sort Pads puts a song's chords into the order its key climbs, starting from the song's own home chord rather than from C. In G major that gives you G, then C, then D, which is the order a keyboard would walk them; alphabetical order would have given you C, D, G and buried the home chord in the middle. Pad order is stored rather than a display setting, so the order you choose is the order that reaches the watch too, and you can always drag a chord where you want it instead. Settings has the same sort for the whole library at once, with a preview of what it would change and an undo afterwards.

Color Tag marks a song with one of five colours, which then shows in the library list. It is a second axis to genre, useful for whatever genre does not capture: songs for one gig, songs you are still learning, songs someone else asked for.

Changes are kept when you tap Save Changes at the bottom. Closing the editor with the X leaves the song as it was.

The song editor showing title and genre fields, the Smart Harmonic Helper offering the eight diatonic chords of A Minor labelled by degree, and the chord sequence below. — The Harmonic Helper, offering A minor's own chords by degree.

The chord sequence section of the editor, with a Sort Pads control above chord rows showing their voicing and bass settings. — Sort Pads, above the chord rows it reorders.

Practice Mode

Practice Mode walks the song's chords at a tempo so you can work on changing between them in time. The metronome button sits in the player's bottom bar for every song, whether or not you have ever set that song up, and starts at a sensible 90 beats per minute.

Switch it on and a strip of upcoming chords appears above the pads, scrolling to keep the current one centred, while the current pad is ringed. Visual and Click toggle the ring and the audible click independently, so you can practice to a silent pulse or to a click alone. The tempo readout beside them takes a nudge up or down while you are playing, which is where you actually discover the right speed. That change is kept with the song.

For finer control, the editor's Practice Guide section takes a time signature (4/4, 3/4, 6/8 or 2/4), how many bars each chord lasts, and a rhythmic style: Quarter Notes, Eighth Notes, or Syncopated Pulse. The bar count matters more than it looks: pick 3/4 and a one-bar chord length and you get three beats per chord rather than four, without having to work the arithmetic out yourself. The click itself comes in four sounds, under Practice Mode in Settings, for when a studio click is the wrong texture to play along to.

There is deliberately no score, no combo counter, and no timer. This is a metronome that knows your chord changes.

The song editor with the Practice Guide section enabled, showing Tempo 90 BPM, Time Signature 4/4, Rhythmic Style Quarter Notes, and Chord Length one bar. — The finer controls, in the editor.

Practice Mode running, with a strip of upcoming chords along the top, a tempo readout of 90 BPM with minus and plus controls, and the current pad ringed in red. — Running, with the next chords in view and the tempo to hand.

Setlists and gig mode

A setlist is a named, ordered group of songs. Create one from the Setlists screen, add songs to it, and drag to reorder. A song can sit in as many setlists as you like, so a Friday night set and a Sunday morning set can share half their material without duplicating anything.

Opening a song from a setlist puts a bar at the top of the player showing the setlist's name, your position in it, and Prev and Next. That is the point of setlists: once you are playing, moving to the next song is one tap in the place your thumb already is, with no trip back to the library.

A setlist named Friday Night Set containing five songs in a chosen order. — An ordered setlist.

The chord player opened from a setlist, with a bar reading Friday Night Set, 2 of 5, and Prev and Next controls. — The same setlist, from inside the player.

Jam Session

A jam session puts two or more iPhones on the same song at the same time. One person hosts and picks the song; everyone else joins and receives it. When the host plays a chord, it lights up on every screen, so the room stays together without anyone calling out changes.

A session does not need a song. Host on a key instead and everyone gets that key's eight chords, which is the version worth reaching for when nobody has agreed on what to play yet.

Each player keeps their own instrument, which is the reason to do this at all rather than passing one phone around. One person on Acoustic Guitar, one on Bass, one on Organ is a band.

Devices find each other directly over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, with no account, no server, and no internet connection involved, so the first time you host, iOS asks permission to find devices on your local network. A song you receive by joining someone else's session is borrowed for the session and is not added to your library.

The Jam Session screen offering Host a Jam and Join a Jam. — Host or join. Everything else follows the host's song.

Drum Kit

The Drum Kit is a fixed six-pad kit: kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, clap, and tom. It is not built out of songs and has nothing to configure. Hits layer on top of each other rather than cutting each other off, so rolls and flams work.

The sounds are sampled from a real kit rather than synthesized, and each pad draws its own instrument: a kick head on, a snare with its wires, hats that separate when they open. Hit one and it flexes and flashes, then settles, so the grid reads as something being played rather than a row of buttons. Where you strike a pad sets how hard the hit lands, exactly as it does on the chord pads.

The watch has the same six pads with a synthesized kit behind them, which is also what provides Practice Mode's click.

The Drum Kit screen with six drawn pads filling the screen: Kick, Snare, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Clap, and Tom, with the snare lit from a hit. — Six pads, no setup, caught mid-hit.

Adding your own songs

You can build any song by hand in the editor. The faster route for a song you already have a chord chart for is to import that chart directly, using a plain-text format called ChordPro.

What Oyoroi Jam reads from a chart

This is the part worth knowing before you import anything, because the app takes less from a chart than most people expect. Oyoroi Jam builds a chord palette, the set of pads you tap, and nothing else:

Chords are imported. Anything in square brackets, like [Am] or [F#m7], is read as a chord. Each distinct chord becomes one pad, in the order it first appears.
The title is imported, if the chart has a {title: ...} line. Otherwise the file's name is used.
Lyrics are not imported. Oyoroi Jam is an instrument rather than a lyric sheet, and it has nowhere to display words. They are read past and discarded.
Song structure is not imported. Section markers like [Chorus] or [Verse 2] are recognized and skipped, so they do not turn into stray chord pads. If you want a verse and chorus arrangement, build it in Practice Mode after importing.

So a five-minute song with forty chord changes across three verses becomes four or five pads. That is the intent: the pads are the instrument, and you play the arrangement yourself.

Three ways to import

Paste it. Tap + in the song list, choose Import ChordPro Chart, and paste the text straight in. Best when you are copying from a page on screen.
Open a file. Oyoroi Jam opens .cho, .crd, .pro, and .chopro files. Save one to Files or iCloud Drive and tap it, or open it from within the app.
AirDrop it. Send a chart from a Mac or another iPhone and choose Oyoroi Jam as the destination.

Every route shows you the song before anything is saved, so a chart that turns out to be wrong costs you nothing. If a file has no recognizable chords in it, the app says so rather than failing silently.

The Import ChordPro screen with a four-line chart pasted in and a Preview Chords button. — A pasted chart, before anything is saved.

The import preview showing the title Wayfaring Stranger and the four chords Am, C, Dm, and E7 that were found. — Eight bracketed chords in the chart, four distinct pads out.

Writing a chart yourself

ChordPro is plain text, and a chart good enough for Oyoroi Jam takes about four lines. Put chords in square brackets wherever they occur, and give the song a title:

{title: Wayfaring Stranger}

[Am]I am a poor way[C]faring [Am]stranger
While [Dm]traveling through this [Am]world of woe

That imports as Wayfaring Stranger with three pads: Am, C, Dm. Since the lyrics are discarded anyway, you can skip them entirely and write only the chords if you prefer:

{title: Wayfaring Stranger}
[Am] [C] [Dm] [E7]

Save it with a .cho extension and open it on your iPhone. Any text editor will do.

Finding charts

ChordPro has been in use since the 1990s and there is a large amount of material in it. A few sources are unambiguously free to use:

Public domain songbooks. Traditional, folk, gospel, and pre-1930 popular songs are generally out of copyright and widely collected online. The fifteen songs bundled with Oyoroi Jam come from exactly this pool.
Your own transcriptions. Working a song out by ear and writing the chart yourself is four lines of typing, as above.
Charts you have been given the right to use, such as material shared within a worship team, a band, or a teacher's own arrangements.

Chord charts for songs still in copyright are a more complicated question, and the answer depends on the source, the country, and how the chart is licensed. We do not host, distribute, or link to chord charts, and what you choose to import is between you and whoever holds the rights. Oyoroi Jam never uploads your library to us; see the privacy policy for what does and does not leave your device.

An imported song behaves exactly like one you built by hand. You can reorder or delete pads, change a chord's inversion, transpose the whole song to match a singer, set a tempo for Practice Mode, or drop it into a setlist. Nothing about an import is second-class.

Apple Watch, iCloud, and backups

Apple Watch. Oyoroi Jam includes a watch app that carries your library to your wrist and plays chords there, six pads to a page, with the Digital Crown turning between pages. The Drum Kit is on the watch too. The watch is a companion rather than a second full app: it plays, and everything else, including editing, setlists and importing, happens on the iPhone. Your library reaches it automatically, with no setup to do.

iCloud. Songs and setlists sync across the iPhones signed in to your own iCloud account, through your private iCloud database. Nothing is shared with us or with anyone else, and there is no account to create because you already have one.

Backups. Settings has an Export Library Backup button that writes every song and setlist to a single file you can AirDrop, save to Files, or keep anywhere else.

Chord pads for John Henry on an Apple Watch, showing G, D, G7, C, and A7. — The same song, on the wrist.

Themes and settings

Four themes ship with the app, and they change the whole interface rather than an accent color: OYOROI Crimson (dark), Classic Studio (light), Cyberpunk Gold, and Stage Neon. Every screenshot on this page is Crimson.

Settings is also where the instrument, the chord pad behaviour described above, the reverb environment, and Practice Mode's visual pulse, audio click and click sound live, along with a switch to keep the screen awake while you play, the whole-library pad sort, the library backup, and a link back to the startup guide you saw on first launch.

The Settings screen showing the four app themes and the instrument list. — Four themes, and the instrument choice underneath.

Still stuck?

If something here does not match what you are seeing, or a chart will not import, or imports with chords you did not expect, send it to us through the contact form. A chart that breaks the importer is useful to us.

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