Several of the groups of people I play music with use song sheets that are similar to lead sheets, but without the stave showing the melody line:
Note that unlike many chord sheets you can find online and in books, there is a time signature, bar lines, and repeat marks. Other musical symbols are also used - simile marks, accents etc.
- Is there a name for this kind of notation?
- What software can be used to produce sheets in this format? Everything I've tried that understands bar lines, also seems to insist on a stave.
Edit in response to comments
I realise that you can make a reasonable attempt at this format in ASCII:
|| C | C | 4||. Now here's a little story, To | tell it is a must. A- | 4||. Some people make a fortune | others earn a mint. My | | G | G C || | bout an unsung hero, that | moves away your dust .|| | old man don't earn much. In | fact he's flippin' skint .||
However this is unsatisfactory in a number of ways.
- It's ugly; you're forced to use a fixed-width font.
- It leads to situations like this: How to read stacked chords?
- Editing is unnecessarily hard work:
- Whenever you change a lyric or a chord, you have to realign at least one other line with spaces. More if you include the lyrics to more verses, as above.
- You have to manage line-wraps yourself. If you've written a couple of pages, then modify the first line and find it goes wider than the page, you have to manually re-wrap the whole song which is difficult (try it if you don't believe me). Because a "line" of "score" is multiple lines of text, the text editor's wrapping feature can't help you (indeed, gets in the way).
- You have to compromise on positioning
- Symbols such as simile are unavailable, or have to be improvised in ASCII-art