Chord Sheets

• Sep 23, 2012 - 22:28

I understand MuseScore is stave-orientated, but what about chord sheets (see example )?

Do Sibelius, Finale or other similar software do it?

Can MusicXML handle it?


Comments

Not sure wherethe example link was supposed to go - it prompted me to select a country, then took me to a pretty generic looking page on sheetmusicdirect. Was there a specific file you wanted to link?

I'm guessing maybe you mean sme sort of pseudo-chart that has just lyrics and chord symbols? I hate those - you end up having to guess where the barlines go. Or maybeyou mean so ethi g where there are bar lines and chords between them? I imagine you could probably fake something like that if necessary in MuseScore by hiding staves.

In reply to by chen lung

Ick. That's the first kind I mentioned. Rather than make these easier to create, I'd prefer a feature that triggered a crash crashed every time MuseScore detected you were trying to create one of those :-)

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Why exactly are you so against this type of chart? When all that needs to be conveyed is the form of the song, and what chord comes where, and you're in a bar or otherwise dimly lit, hectic place, isn't it preferable to have a very easy-to-read chart? Or are we not looking at the same thing? I gig 3-4 times here in NYC and I'm specifically looking for how to make this kind of chart. I also have scores with everything written out, but some gigs don't call for that.

In reply to by brianlaz

For the record, I was being a bit facetious. The chart in question is the kind with no barlines and no notes, just lyrics and chord symbols. As a musician who is often playing in exactly the settings you describe, I hate playing fro these kind of charts because they require me to basically already know the song and/or follow along with the lyrics in order to know when those chord changes occur. I'd much rather have a staff with barlines to make the form clear.

That said, it *can* be handy to have these lyrics-plus-chords-only charts if you do basically already know the song - so you already have a sense of when those chord changes are and just need to be reminded of what the chords actually are. These can be created in MsueScore; they just take a little bit of set up (invisible staff lines, no barlines, time signature, or clef in Staff Properties, tweak position of lyrics and chord symbols in style settings). Once you've set it up, you can save it to your Templates folder reuse it as desired. Then you can enter the notes for a sogn, mark them invisible, then attach chord symbols and lyrics.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Indeed Marc, for those of us who work in rock/blues we know the songs, but when you have a songlist numbered in the hundreds sometimes all you need as a bass player is a reminder of the chord changes and roughly where they are.

I would most prefer Musescore to have the ability to output chordpro files for this purpose. The reason is that programs which are responsible for rendering chordpro can do multicolumn, multipage etc. depending on the output device. Producing a PDF file does not have this flexibility.

I know that there is a discussion elsewhere about a general MusicXML to Chordpro converter being a better idea but there is no such thing AFAIK.

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