Chord Sheets

[GAJ52]

If I'm playing the rhythm part to a song I need to read from sheet or tab music as to which chords to play i.e. C Am F Dm etc (not very good at playing chords by ear). As I need to condense this to one sheet of A4 paper I tend to write the chords into MS Excel - one bar per cell.

What I would like is to include a chord diagram at the top of the page of the chords I will be using in this particular song so Excel is not very convenient for that. Can anyone recommend some software that I could use to type out chords and have the diagrams at the top of the page - just the chords, not any notation or tab. As thats all I want to do I don't want to spend megabucks on expensive notation software.

Thanks Glen

[nighthawk]

Hi Glen, have you thought about using the draw facility in Excel.

You would only need to draw the frets once and save them in a separate sheet then you could copy and paste them as many times as you like at the top of the sheet. Then just draw a circle at the first intersection you require then again just copy and paste this as many times as you like on the other lines. You probably won't get them in the correct position at first but all you need to do is right click them and move them to where you require.

It's a bit fiddly at first but you soon get the hang of it. In fact just thinking about it you could have a separate sheet full of chords, building them up as you use them, then you only need to copy and paste them on to your song sheet.

You can't get any cheeper than this and you only have to draw each chord once.

Hope this is of some help

Les

[bluelenton]

Glen
Have sent PM or follow this link.
www.tabguitarlessons.com/downloadchords.cgi/ultimate-guitar-chords.pdf
Hope this of use
Rgds
John

[GAJ52]

Hi Les

Thats a good idea and worth considering, but I'm surprised there is not a kind of chord progression software, purely for rhythm guitarists who know what a F#m chord is but just need the correct chord sequence to a song. Most chords are included with tab or sheet music but it does mean having 4 or more sheets of paper propped up somewhere when just the chords could be condensed to one sheet.

John

Many thanks for your reply, but its not chord charts I'm looking for its more a chord progression sequence for a song, so I could have all the chords for say 'Atlantis' on one A4 sheet of paper. My old guitar teacher used to write chord sequences on the back of birthday and xmas cards. I was just wondering if there was anything a bit more professional for this purpose that fellow forum members may have come across on the internet.

Glen

[Charlie Hall]

Hi Glen,
It might be because there can be few or many chord changes in a single bar of music. No software is going to know the chords to any particular tune or how often the changes occur.
I just use Open Office Writer (free equivalent to MS Word) to type out the chords, eg. Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue would look something like this the way I would write it:
Intro
A D / A E / A D / A E /
Verse
A / D / A D / A / D / D / A D / A / E / D / A D / A E /
etc.
Note the slashes, indicating the count of 8 beats per bar in this case, but bearing in mind that Buddy played two down strokes for every beat in this song, thereby playing 16 downstrokes per bar. Some chord sequences are more complicated in timing than this, an example of no particular tune below:
A D E E / A D E E / A A D D / A - - - /
The dashes could indicate beats that are not played in this case.
Regards,
Charlie