Printing chords of songs

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playtab is a Perl program that generates PostScript to print the chords of songs. The result is intended for musicians that want to accompany the song.

The input for playtab is plain ASCII. It contains the chords, the division in bars, with optional annotations.

An example:

    !t Blue Bossa

    Bossanova
    =
    | c-9 ... | f-9 ... | d% . g7 . | c-9 ... |
    | es-9 . as6 . | desmaj7 ... | d% . g7 . | c-9 . d% g7 |

This will be printed as:

[Image]

Note that in this example each bar has 4 'places', although not all of them are filled with a chord. By using '.' for repeating chords, a place is left empty so the bars come out aligned in the diagram.

Another example:

    !t Donna Lee
    !s Charlie Parker

    Order: A B A B

    = A
    | as . | f7 . | bes7 . | bes7 . |
    | bes-7 . | es7 . | as . | es-7 D7 |
    | des . | des-7 . | as . | f7 . |
    | bes7 . | bes7 . | bes-7 . | es7 . |

    = B
    | as . | f7 . | bes7 . | bes7 . |
    | c7 . | c7 . | f- . | c7#9 . |
    | f- . | c7 . | f- . | aso . |
    | as f7 | bes-7 es7 | as - | bes-7 es7 |

This will be printed as:

[Image]

Chord diagrams can be included, e.g.

[Image]

For LilyPond adepts, chords can also be specified using the LilyPond syntax, e.g.

    | aes2 | f:7 | bes:7 | bes:7 |
    | bes:m7 | ees:7 | aes | ees4:m7 d:7 |
    ...

Current version: 2.018
Archived: CPAN sites. The CPAN search engine will find it for you.
Alternatively, you can look in directory authors/Johan_Vromans for file App-Music-PlayTab-x.y.tar.gz, where x.y indicates the version number.