The Chords Track
The Chords Track displays the chords in the song. Each chord can be edited and have its start and end times adjusted.
Hearing a Chord
Clicking a Chord will play the chord through the built-in keyboard sampler. This is enabled by default, but may be disabled by selecting the Play chords when clicked item on the Chords menu.
Auto-play Chords
Chords can be set to auto-play along with the song. To enable/disable this feature, select Auto play chords from the Chords menu. Alt+o is the default shortcut for toggling auto playing of chords. When chords are played, the notes are displayed on the Piano bar (p toggles viewing Piano bar).
Editing Chords
Chord markers are edited in the same way as other markers, so refer to Tracks and Markers for details.
To modify the chord name and/or it's color, double-click the chord marker or right-click it and select "Edit chord properties". This will display the chord editor, shown below:
You need to select one label from the Root, Base, ExtendedForm, and Bass groups. The Extensions group allows you to click on any combination of notes to add them to the chord.
Instead of a chord symbol, you can select the symbol used to denote a repeat of the previous measure ("%"). This symbol is found as the last item in the Root column.
Next/Prev Chord
You can quickly move to the next and previous chord with the editor dialog open by pressing:
- Ctrl+Tab to move to next chord
- Shift+Ctrl+Tab to move to previous chord
Hearing the edited Chord
You can hear what the selected chord sounds like by clicking the PLAY CHORD button. If you'd like to hear the chord played immediately after you edit it, click the checkbox Play Chord when edited.
Simplifying Chords
You can control the complexity of chords in the Chord Track by selecting Simplify Chords... from the Chords menu. You can limit chords to just major and minor chords, just triads (major, minor, sus, diminished, and augmented), all chords up to and an including 7ths, and not filtering chords. You can also decide to filter out bass notes from chords.
If you are increasing the complexity, then the Simplify All button will be re-labeled to Re-analyze chords.
Clicking the Re-analyze button will run the chord recognition algorithm again and any chord edits you made will be replaced. Remember you can always Undo the re-analyze if it is not what you wanted.
The setting selected in this dialog also becomes the new default setting for new songs.
Quickly Copy and Paste Chords in a Section
If you have edited and properly aligned the Sections markers, then once you have the chords edited for a section you can quickly copy and paste those chords to other sections.
If you right-click over the Section marker, you can select the commands Copy Chords in Section, Paste Chords to Section, and Copy Chords in Section to All Named Sections.
These commands allow you to modify the chords in one section (i.e. the first Verse) and copy them to one or more sections. Typically, you would edit the chords in a section, select Copy Chords in Section, and move the mouse to the section that contains the same chords and select Paste Chords to Section.
You can quickly copy the chords in one section to all other sections named the same in one step with the Copy Chords in Section to All Named Sections command.
Tidying up marker start and end times
You can have Song Master tidy up the start/end times of all or just a selection of chord markers. In the demo below, we first change the snap to setting to beat so the start times will be moved to the closest beat. We then click the Fmaj7 marker and then shift-click Dm to select all markers between them. The context menu allows us to just tidy up the selected chords while the track header's menu gives us an option to tidy up all markers:
Instrument Transpose
The chord root that is displayed in the Chord track is affected by the Pitch transpose and the Instrument transpose settings on the Tools tab's Pitch Panel.
If Pitch Transposes is checked, then chord symbols will be transposed according to the number of semitones that the pitch is changed. Chords will also be transposed according to the number of semitones specified by the Ins trans setting. The total amount transposed is the sum of Pitch transpose and Ins trans settings.
Instrument transpose is useful if you play a transposing instrument or if, for example, you've tuned your guitar a step down to Eb and are playing along to a recording that is tuned a step down but you what the chords to be notated up a step (i.e. display Eb chord as E)
Chord Notations
Chords can be displayed using three notation styles: Tradiational, Roman numeral, and Nashville.
To change which notation is used, click the down arrow in the Chords track header section:
