adding extra info to chord lines and still allowing transpose

johnplanetz

Hi Peter,
I'm beginning to transfer my songs lyrics into ST3, and I want to take advantage of ST3's ability to transpose chord lines.

I have some cases like:
C F G x2
or
C F G (change to G on and of 4)
or using dots as beat indicators, like:
C..F G..Dm C...
These examples don't auto-recognize as chords.

I saw you in the manual that U can force these to be formatted like chords using a backtick at the start of the line. But then it seems that transposing a song doesn't apply to those lines.

Am I missing something? Or do you have a recommendation of how to handle this type of thing?

Thanks again!
-John

peter

No, you are not missing something. In order for automatic transpose to work, the app needs to be able to identify the chords. And that does not work if you force a line to be rendered as chords. You need to stick to the official supported chord notation described here: https://stagetraxx.com/user-guide/lyrics/#adding-chords

johnplanetz

Thanks Peter. Would this be a reasonable feature request?
For any line that is forced with a backtick to be rendered as chords, apply the usual chord detection logic within the line (looking for note names separated by punctuation like space, commas, periods, semicolons, etc). And apply transposition to any found notes.

I'm guessing you might be worried about occasionally getting some false positives, where it detects a non-note word as a note, but it seems this would be rare, and the user could just modify the text on the line to avoid it.

Thoughts?

Thanks again!
-John

Lishy

johnplanetz just remove the X2 after and put 2 lines of chords and put the line of text underneath. This will solve your issue.

peter

I don't see how the app could recognize chords in a failproof way. If I make the settings a bit more relaxed, chances are high that a regular text like "I am" will be transposed to "I bbm" for example.

johnplanetz

I think there's no 100% foolproof way, but it seems that misrecognitions would be rare! (Is "Am" the only one?)
If it occurred, the user could just revise their text to avoid it, like changing "I am" to "I'm". Or I suppose there could be a new setting option to enable/disable chord transposition on custom lines.

peter

No, there are plenty of possibilities. Chord combinations can be part of many words.

johnplanetz

Ah. I had assumed that the chord detection paid attention to whitespace/punctuation. So I thought if the backtick detection logic was changed, a word like "sample" wouldn't be misrecognized as containing "Am" as a chord.

But I just tried it in ST3, and was surprised that it recognizes a run-on string like "ambmc7defg" as a series of chords. But if I add commas ("am, bm, c, d") or anything other than whitespace, it fails to recognize the chords...

So I guess the only solution for now will be to take more vertical space in the lyrics, separating any instructions/comments on a separate backtick line after the chords, with no transposition in the comments. For example:

instead of
C F G (change to G on the and of 4)
it would have to be
C F G
`(change to G on the and of 4)
and if when transposed, the "change to G" instruction would not be correct...

Thanks for your quick replies. Maybe add this to your lower priority "would be nice some day" list, to think about further if you have time/bandwidth?

-John

peter

Chord detection is only performed on lines that have been identified as chord lines. When you put a comma in there, that line is no longer recognized as being a chord line and will not be considered in transposing.

A good rule is that if a line is automatically rendered as chords, the automatic transposing will work. If not, it will not work.