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lyrics with chords

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the guitaritz, piano- & bassplayer@discussions.microsoft.com René the guitaritz, piano- & bassplayer

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Sep 10, 2006, 1:58:02 PM9/10/06
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Nowhere on the net have I found a tool for writing the song lyrics AND the
cords in anyway other than by using fonts like courier, helvetica, Times etc.
where every letter, sign og space have the same size. And then you have to
write the lyrics on every other line and the cords on the line above.

The problem is that it is very time consuming, it's not very graphically
nice to look at, it's time consuming to alter the key (e.g. from C-mayor to
D-mayor) and it makes it difficult if not impossible to integrate song lyrics
with cords into normal documents, and so on and so forth.

It would be a BIG help to all musicians world wide if a way could be found
to attach a chord to a single caracter or even to a space between caracters
so that no matter where that caracter is moved - it will have the chord
written above it.

Better still if someone could programme a macro or funktion where the above
mentioned chords could be transposed from one key to another. It shouldn't be
impossible as chords or notes could be assigned a numeric value and if you
e.g. transpose a song from C-mayor to D-major it would mean that all chords
would have to transposed accordingly: from C to D = 2 half-notes or 2 steps
on a full scale:

C - C#(=Db) - D - D#(=Eb) - E - F - F#(=Gb) - G - G#(=Ab) - A - A#(=Bb) - B
- C

I hope others will support this idea as it would make MicOffice an even more
essential tool.

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Jay Freedman

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Sep 10, 2006, 5:26:54 PM9/10/06
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The very last thing I would want to see is a gigantic, complicated
program like Word made more gigantic and complicated to accommodate
music notation.

There are plenty of music notation and guitar tablature programs
available on the Web, with prices from free to several hundred
dollars, and with capabilities to match. Post a request in the
newsgroup rec.music.compose for recommendations to meet your
requirements.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:58:02 -0700, René the guitaritz, piano- &
bassplayer <René the guitaritz, piano- &

Helmut Weber

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Sep 11, 2006, 10:50:18 AM9/11/06
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Hi Jay,

quite a lot of years ago,
I came about an autocad application,
which drew notes and lyrics.

Probably wasn't too fast,
besides of the prize of a plotter.

Helmut


Michael Bednarek

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Sep 12, 2006, 12:08:32 AM9/12/06
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On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:58:02 -0700, René the guitaritz, piano- &
bassplayer wrote in microsoft.public.word.vba.general:

>Nowhere on the net have I found a tool for writing the song lyrics AND the
>cords in anyway other than by using fonts like courier, helvetica, Times etc.
>where every letter, sign og space have the same size. And then you have to
>write the lyrics on every other line and the cords on the line above.

A word processor is not the right tool for music notation, although
there are notation-specific fonts available, but I suspect their chord
symbols may be limited.

As Jay Freedman already pointed out, there are many dedicated tools for
this task available. My preference is MOZART ("the music processor™")
(<http://www.mozart.co.uk/>) which should do everything you want and
more, at a reasonable price (US$120). A free demo is also available, and
there is a friendly and helpful mailing list
(<http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mozart_software/>) with the very
active participation of the program's author.

A notation program like MOZART will take care of musical syntax (e.g.
how many beats in a bar), different conventions of notating chords,
chords for different instruments (e.g. guitars, ukuleles, lutes) and
capo settings, and thorny tasks like transposing between keys, and
especially in your case, keeping lyrics aligned with the chords. They
will also allow listening to the score through MIDI output. A word
processor won't, and shouldn't be asked to, do any of this.

--
Michael Bednarek http://mbednarek.com/ "POST NO BILLS"

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