chord diagram software

Subject: chord diagram software
From: johnfitz.com
Date: 04 May 04 - 08:23 PM

I am working on a book of camp songs. It is going to include both the lyrics and the chords, not notation or tab. Does anyone know of a program with which I can insert chord diagrams onto the lyrics page. Thanks very much.

PS If anyone is interested in camp songs, here is a link to the songs being included in the book A Summer's Voice

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: GUEST,Bardford
Date: 04 May 04 - 10:50 PM

if you don't need staff notation or tab, a guitar chord font might be the easiest route Just insert into your lyric text. There are a number of them. A google search on "guitar chord fonts" unearths a few options.

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: Mark Clark
Date: 05 May 04 - 12:54 AM

There are a number of free methods for generating good chord diagrams. The choice depends partly on how computer savvy you are. If you're comfortable with GNU/Linux and have used (and installed) TeX/LaTeX you could publish your whole book using LilyPond. If you're a Windows XP or 2K user, you could get all those things installed by installing Cygwin, a Posix API for Windows that supports nearly all of the GNU UNIX-like tools.

If the tech-weenie route seems daunting, you can get the chord diagrams out of a much simpler system called GuitarTeX. There is even an online script that will convert your chord file to a diagram without needing to install a bunch of software. The chord diagrams will be in PostScript or Encapsulated PostScript and can either be dropped directly into a word processing document or converted to another graphics format like WMF before using. I'm guessing that your book of camp songs won't be needing a large vocabulary of chords so the effort to get diagrams this way should be manageable.

There is also a LaTeX package for typesetting guitar chords called GCHORDS.

      - Mark

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: pavane
Date: 05 May 04 - 01:59 AM

I am considering updating my program HARMONY to include chord diagrams as an alternative to chord names, but haven't got round to it yet.

(HARMONY can already import abc with aligned lyrics and chord symbols, and display as a score.)

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 04 - 07:54 AM

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

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 04 - 07:57 AM

I forgot to note - apparently they had to hide from Mark, so they've moved the

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 04 - 08:00 AM

And then I mess up a simple link. (trying to copy part of one link into another one.)

I forgot to note - apparently they had to hide from Mark, so they've moved the Guitar Chord Dictionary. The link above will forward you to the new site, but this one should go direct.

John

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: Mark Clark
Date: 05 May 04 - 12:28 PM

Thanks, John. Actually, I think the University of Virginia changed the site because they had some internal controversy over using University funds to, in effect, support other sites. Not only has the direct link API been killed but it seems one can no longer specify any desired fingering in chord searches. One fingering for a ninth chord I use a lot in jazz tunes is (for, say, an E9) 4/x/2/4/3/2 bass to treble. When I use the dictionary site now, it finds no chord names for that fingering and when I request an E9/G# at the second fret, it tells me there are no such fingerings. Too bad because this is an important fingering.

I think the site no longer generates the symbol in real time as it used to. They now rely on a library of GIF images that are indexed and just referenced in the search results. If you look at the source HTML, it's easy to see how a person could build a web site that displayed all their chord diagrams in a table format. You'd just have to go through the effort to correlate all the diagram numbers with chord names.

I also thought the Online Guitar Chord Dictionary would be a natural place to mine chord symbols so, before posting above, I saved some of the GIF images to play with. When I dropped them into a Word document and sized them so they would fit over lyrics, they became too small and distorted to be useful. They just don't scale well. Perhaps John could use them if he kept all the diagrams in a appendix and just referred to them by name on the lyrics pages.

On the other hand, PostScript does scale well. That is what it was designed to do. That's why I thought maybe the GuitarTeX site would be worth trying. I haven't tried it yet but it looks as though one could generate chord diagrams without having to download or install a TeX package and the GuitarTeX software. If John only needs a few basic chords in a few of the most common keys for his book, the GuitarTeX site could be the answer. Maybe I'll go play around with it some.

      - Mark

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 04 - 05:21 PM

Mark -

The big problem with using the fret diagrams from one of the fonts, at least so far as I can see, is that there's no good chart of which one's which. If there's a correlation between chord names and char numbers I haven't found it. If you know the fingering you want to display, you could of course just look for the right picture, but I'm not that fluent with guitar fingerings. I have a hard time distinguishing one from another in CharMap, the usual way of doing a visual search for a character; but then I've lost a little of the "eagle eye" I had as a youth, and it may be easier for some people.

The .gif glyphs from the Chord site print ok on my LJ1200 printer, although cut down to size they sort of "blur out" in the Word display. It does get really hard to read the little characters around the edges of the chart if you cut them down to less than about 3/8 inch (25 pt or so equiv), and larger would be better; but I think you'll have the same problem of legibility even with a font. The .gif are much larger than you'd want, so reducing them at least doesn't pixilate, and I don't see any distortion (in the print) when they're resized in Word. (If you resize by just dragging the edges of the image, you do sometimes get distortion in Word, especially if you don't hold down the "lock aspect key" during the drag. If you use the picture toolbar and set size, they're usually prettty clean.)

If the stuff is pretty simple, as in just text verses with the fret diagrams, I'd probably be inclined just to put the whole thing in an image editor, and make a .jpg of the whole page - or at least of each song.

PostScript is great, and I use it a lot; but then I've set up for it. Most people (esp. that need to ask) are not going to have a PostScript enabled printer - or at least won't know they have one, so it's sort of an "all or nothing" to use it in the present task.

The idea of putting just the chord names with the lyrics, with fingering diagrams in an appendix, is probably the one most often used, just because of the mismatch in the space needed for a legible finger chart vs the spacing that's good for the lyrics. Getting 20 to 50 point characters in one line to line up (and stay aligned) with 10 or 12 point characters in the next line is not generally an easy layout. I know that the TeX programs handle it well, and there is an "easy but tedious" way of doing it in Word, but it's not an instant answer in either case for most users.

If you wanted to do a little more work, you could put the fingerings at the top, bottom, or side of each page, in a small chart, with just the fingerings for the songs on that page. The expectation would be that for a song sheet where you need to put fingerings in, you're not going to need more than a few simple ones.

John

Subject: RE: chord diagram software
From: s&r
Date: 06 May 04 - 06:28 AM

chord pro manager is still available for download; gives all common chords plus you can customise your own. It work well, without having to nudge the chord symbols along

Stu