SongBook Help

Advanced chord placement

Chords in the middle of words

When you are editing a song, the SongBook displays a preview of your final chord chart below the entry form. In that preview area, you can click on any lyric and add or edit the chord that accompanies that word. However, this method only lets you put chords at the beginning of words.

To place chords in the middle of words, input the chords directly in the entry form along with the lyrics. Chords should be surrounded by square-brackets, in-line with and immediately before the lyric they should appear above. For example:

    [C] A mighty [G]fort[Em]ress [Am]is [D]our [G]God, [C]a [Em]bul[F]wark [C/E]ne[F]ver [Dm]fa[G]i[C]ling

Spacing for long chords

Maybe you’re used to adding spaces and hyphens to words, in order to fit in long chords. With the SongBook, you no longer need to do that. The SongBook will automatically add hyphens whenever a long chord would break up a single word. For example, the SongBook automatically hyphenates this:

    [Esus]Ho[E]ly

and displays it like this:

Chords centered over continuations

Sometimes, multiple chords are played while holding a single vowel sound. You could group all of those chords together over a single hyphen, but sometimes it is clearer to have one hyphen per chord, with each chord centered over its own hyphen. To accomplish this, put each chord in its own set of [ ] brackets, followed by a hyphen. For example, this line from Angels We Have Heard On High:

    [F]Glo[D]-[Gm]-[C]-[Fmaj7]-[Bb]-[C]-ria[C7]

would be displayed like this:

Chords spanning words

The SongBook allows a chord or group of chords to flow over multiple words. For example, this line:

    [G5/B]I once was [G7]lost

would be displayed like this:

Note how the G⁵/B chord flows over the word “once”. If you have a chord like this, and you want the following word to move out from under the long chord, you will need to add an “empty chord” to the word you want to move, like this:

    [G5/B]I [ ]once was [G7]lost

This tells the SongBook that you want to have empty space above the word “once”, and would be displayed like this: