Chords and Lyrics

Chords and Lyrics can be entered in the Chord Editor and Lyric Editor respectively, which are available from the Editing menu. These Chords and Lyrics can be displayed in almost any editor, which makes it much easier to see "where you are". They can be made visible using small buttons labeled C and L which appear on the left hand side of the editors. The Chords appear at the top of the editor, the Lyrics appear at the bottom.

Entering Chords is pretty easy, since you probably have them on paper or in your head anyway. Entering Lyrics is a bit more work because it's not so easy to decide where the bars and beats are. It's recommended to type the lyrics first, and then add the bar separators (and optionally the beat separators).

Bars are separated by '|' characters. Inside a bar, beats are separated by '-' characters.

Here are examples of chords and lyrics (not related to each other):

||        empty bar for count in Intro: | C | Am | F |Gsus4-Gsus4- G - G | | C | Am | Bb | G7 |		|| | The sky - is blue - and I - love you | | It's true - it's true - it's true - it's true|
Chords example		Lyrics example

Note that any text which is not in a bar is ignored, and thus can be used to add comments.
Spaces can be used anywhere you like. However, spaces aren't allowed in chord names (ie. you must type 'Gsus4' instead of 'G sus 4').

Since MultitrackStudio stores the tempo in MIDI files, there must be at least one MIDI track in a Song in order to be able to align the chords and lyrics with the tracks. See Extracting tempo from a Track if your song is audio only.

Transpose Chords

The Transpose button can be used to transpose the selected chords. You can use this if you decide to play the guitar part using a capo. Transposed chords always use sharps, never flats (D# instead of Eb etc.). If a bass note is present at the end of the chord, seperated by a slash (eg. C/B) , then this bass note will be transposed as well.

Create MIDI Tracks from Chords

Using the Track button you can create MIDI files from the chords. These files will be loaded in a Track automatically. Guitar, Piano, Bass and Strings tracks can be created. These tracks can be used to make sure the chords are OK, or to create backing tracks for practising a guitar solo etc.

Copy Lyrics to Clipboard

The Copy button copies the lyrics to the Windows Clipboard. All bar and beat separators are removed. You can paste the lyrics in a text editor and print them.