ChordPro

I wanted to play “When You Go” by Noah Guthrie on guitar. Since Noah is rather a niche musician, these tabs weren’t available on Ultimate Guitar or any of the other less common sites known to host chords and tablature.

A classic singer-songwriter chord annotation sheet has lyrics that are triple- or quadruple-spaced, above which are the chords one should be playing during that lyric. If you know the melody and general shape of the song, this document is always sufficient to play along with a guitar. That’s precisely the notation used on sites like Ultimate Guitar, and I wanted to create that for “When You Go”.

There are many sites that can generate rough chord structures for songs. Between using one of those and some musical know-how, then looking up official lyrics, I had all the components. But I was missing the necessary tool to put them all together into a final document.

Two obvious laborious choices were printing out the lyrics and annotating the chords by hand. Then, I could have scanned the resulting document as a PDF. Or, open a plain text document and get to work.

Neither of these seemed great, and I don’t believe thousands and thousands of song chord charts are created by hand-spacing the annotations in Word. After a quick search, I discovered ChordPro. As they state simply in the sub-header of the website:

A simple text format for the notation of lyrics with chords.

That’s precisely it. You type in lyrics, and add in-line chord references using brackets. Add additional metadata inside curly braces, and you will have a clean song sheet lickety-split.

I’m sure people get crazy with custom formatting. I opted for a pre-built option. Here’s a snippet of the plain text:

{title: When You Go}
{artist: Noah Guthrie}
{time: 3/4}
{key: E}
{tempo: 120}


{start_of_verse: Intro}
[C#m] [B] [A] [C#m] [B] [A] [C#m] [B] [A] [E] [F#m] [B]
{end_of_verse}

{start_of_verse: Verse 1} 

Came [E]alive when I [B]saw you [G#m] [A]

Like a [E]lie that we [B]live through [G#m]time and [A]again.

Fell [E]apart when we [B]came to. [G#m] [A]

Had our [E]world by the [B]tail we let it [G#m]run off [A]again. [B]

{end_of_verse}

{start_of_verse: Verse 2}

Where was [E]I come [B]sunrise [G#m] [A]

When the [E]light from your [B]window crept [G#m]onto the [A]bed.

All [E]alone in a [B]wasteland [G#m] [A]

Ain’t no [E]room for the [B]two of us [G#m]inside of my [A]head. [B]

{end_of_verse}

And the resulting document.¹

The system that eventually became ChordPro originated over 34 years ago! Similar to why I love Markdown, the plain text is as usable as the final formatted document for the intended purpose. Any musician could look at the text above and use it to track with a song. It’s a clever and simple tool, and I adore it.