Why Chordtube ?

Many websites offer chords and lyrics for thousands of songs. The “Chord over lyrics” format has become as universal as that of sheet music or tablature.

This is based on two hypothesis :

• The musicians know the melody of the song
• They will play the chords in synchronization with it.
• It is sometimes satisfying because many pop songs are composed with one chord per measure.

However, the absence of any notion of rhythm in this notation, and the frequent forgetting of instrumental passages makes this format unsatisfactory. Many musicians forced to massively annotate the material in order to play correctly.

Chords, tubes, dots

The vertical bar symbol | (“pipe” or “tube”) is sometimes used to demarcate a measure containing several chords.

The dot to signal representing a beat when the chords do not divide the measure equally.

Chordtube notation proposes to formalize the use of these two symbols (and a few others) in order to

• Serves both the singers accompanying themselves and the accompanists.
• Enable several representations of same song (chord over lyrics, chord grid...)
• Ease the edition of chord over lyrics to help contributors of continuously improve it

Inspirations

Some softwares developers has already worked around this subject

Chordpro format documentation propose a grid directive. Hovever, not compatible with typical "Chord into brackets inside lyrics" chordpro notation

Chordsheet maker proposes its own notation to display chord grids, but without any consideration of lyrics