The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69456   Message #1178369
Posted By: JohnInKansas
05-May-04 - 07:54 AM
Thread Name: chord diagram software
Subject: RE: chord diagram software
Many music notation programs can place chord names and/or fret diagrams above a score, but if you're not wanting to fully notate your song sheets, it may be simpler to use a font that contains the diagrams you want. Finding the correct diagram in one of these fonts can be a real challenge, since the chord names aren't part of the glyph for each fingering, and the location of a specific glyph in the font has no simple relationship to your keyboard characters.

A common font set, that you should be able to find easily, includes FretsA, FretsB, and FretsC. If you use the fret fonts, you'll probably also want to separately place the chord name (e.g. C7, D#) appropriately. This can be tedious to lay out, but can be done in Word or other text program.

Mark Clark gave a method in the Chord Diagram Primer thread for creating a link to a specific chord in an html post (like here) that lets you see the fingering and hear a midi of the chord. Apparently his method was too successful, as the site referenced indicates that they've had to disable direct linking due to excess resource demands, but you can still use the site to display and hear - you just have to go there and find (build) the chord you want. When you get the chord, with the fingering you want, you can right click on the diagram and "save picture as" to get a .gif of the diagram.

The default .gif picture is about 1.5 inches square, so you'd need to size it appropriately for your text. The picture that you get has the chord name above, and note names for the fretted string positions below, and a fret position at the right, all of which can be cropped out directly in Word if you don't want them all.

Pasting a lot of pictures into text with good alignment with the associated text can be "touchy" so you may have to study up on text boxes and frames a bit to get the result you want in a word processor layout. It's not really as complex as it may look at first, but the best method depends on how you want your layout to look.

The site Mark Clark linked, where you can get the fret diagram pictures is at Guitar Chord Dictionary

John