How it all started

Chorder started from a need to visualize my own songs in a structured way and for our jam sessions. The existing websites and tools for annotating songs with their chords and structure were useful for the times that I had to play by myself. However, for our practice and live sessions, we had to either print the lyrics and annotate them with chords in a readable way, or had to write them on a piece of paper and make it work for us.

I started Chorder to address this issue, and to allow us avoid the need to print, waste paper and make it easier to visualize our songs in a structured way. With Chorder, we can now visualize our songs in a structured way, and use it on our tablets and mobile devices. This means that you can now use it for your jam sessions, live performances, etc. as well :).

How to get started with your songs?

I use a very simple format for annotating songs, which is similar to other markdown languages and other tools for annotating songs. We can jump right in with a simple example.

• log-in to your account, or sign up if you haven't already.
• create a new song with the following content:

# Verse 1
I see {F|Am}trees of green, {Bb|Am}  red roses too
{Gm7|F}  I see them bloom, {A7|Dm} for me and you
...

# Bridge
The {G}colours of the rainbow, so {C}pretty in the sky
Are {G}also on the faces of {C}people going by

• Click on Save to save your songs for later use.
• Click on Chordify to generate a nice view of the song. You should be able to see something like this:

This turns into:

How to add multiple chords for individual beats in a bar?

You can add multiple chords for individual beats in a bar by separating them with a pipe |. For example, {F|Am} will show F for the first beat and Am for the second beat in the bar.

# Verse 1
I see {F|Am}trees of green, {Bb|Am}  red roses too
{Gm7|F}  I see them bloom, {A7|Dm} for me and you

# Bridge
The {G}colours of the rainbow, so {C}pretty in the sky
Are {G}also on the faces of {C}people going by

This turns into:

How to split your songs into columns?

When using Chorder on a laptop or a tablet in landscape mode, you might want to split your song into multiple columns. You can do this by adding [song_column] on a new line to start a new column. The content will be split at these markers:

# Verse 1
foo{Am} bar{Em}
[song_column]
# Chorus
This is the{G} chorus{C}

This turns into: