Guitar Songbook Wizard - Documentation

The documentation is currently under development. Please check out the examples in the meantime to find out more details about the Songbook Wizard syntax. Large portions of this documentation have been kindly provided by Stephen Peringer. Thanks!

1. Introduction

The Songbook Wizard is a website that helps you quickly create beautiful, easy-to-read guitar songsheets including standard chord diagrams without doing any formatting yourself. You just tell the Songbook Wizard the information about your song, and it will produce an Adobe PDF document with the click of one button. The following sections outline the simple method for giving the song information to Songbook Wizard in a way it will understand.

2. Structure of a Songbook Wizard input file

A Songbook Wizard input file consists of three parts: header, chords, and lyrics. Each part is separated form the next one by a blank line. Each part will be described in detail in the sections 2.1-2.3 below. Let's take a look at a complete SBW input file, the song 1992 from Blur:

2.1 Header

This is the header section from the above example. The three variables are title, artist and subtitle. Each variable must appear on its own line. No matter what order the variables are entered, they will appear in the PDF file in the order, title, artist, subtitle. The subtitle can be omitted.

2.2 Chords

The chords section is where you give the wizard the data it needs to produce chord diagrams for your PDF. Each line describes the chord shapes required in the song. There are up to four variables per line (that is, per chord), all separated by commas. The four variables are the chord name, base fret, notes, and barre position. This is how to write the variables in each line:

• chord name: This is the traditional name of the chord, like C, G#m, etc. use "b" for flat, "#" for sharp, and anything you want in superscript, in brackets, like A(sus2) in the above example.
• base fret: If your chord contains any fretted notes above the 5th fret, put the number of the fret closest to the nut that is played in the chord. In the example, the G#m chord is played from the 4th fret, so there's a "4" in the base fret position, after the chord name.
• notes: The six characters in this section represent the six notes of the chord, starting with the low E string ("low" is in low note, not physically lower than the other strings), working up to the high e string. If a string is not played, put "x". If a string is played, but left open (not fretted), put "0" (zero). If the string is barred, put "b". In the example, the D chord is played only on the D, G, B and high e strings - in open position, 2nd, 3rd and 2nd frets respectively. The F chord above is barred on the low E, B and high e strings, and the A, D and G strings are fretted at 3rd, 3rd and 2nd respectively. NOTE: All the numbers in the notes variable are relative to the base fret number (i.e. 1=base fret). If you didn't set a base fret then the numbers are relative to the nut.
• barre position: If your chord includes barred notes ("b" in the notes variable), you must indicate where the barre is made in the barre position variable. In the example above, the F chord is barred at the 1st fret, as represented by the "1" at the end. The barre position is relative to the base fret. So, in the G#m example above, the barre is at the 4th fret, because "1" is the first fret relative to the base fret which is 4.

2.3 Lyrics

Sections like "Intro" and "Verse" are lines ending with a semicolon (:). These lines appear in the PDF as section titles in italics to the left of the indented lyrics. The chord names that you would like printed above the lyrics should be written in [square brackets]. The chord names in square brackets will appear immediately above whatever text follows them. All other text in the lyrics section will appear exactly as printed, including line breaks. NOTE: If you have chords with no lyrics, as in the Intro section in the example, an empty line will be inserted. This means you do not need to insert a line break before the next section to keep a consistent look.

3. Final Remarks

• Currently, only normal characters from the US English keyboard will appear in the PDF. No non-English characters at all.
• The best way to figure it out is to enter some data, run the wizard and see what comes out. Have fun!