How do you write charts for guitar?

[Tom S.]

I play in a praise band and we have a fair amount of music that is fairly complicated (for me) with as many as 7 or 8 pages with fairly complicated rythyms in some parts. I find it too hard to play from the standard music even though the chords are above each measure due to turning pages tec. We have tried the notation where it is just words and chords as found on musicarchive.com. This is OK if you know the song, but most songs are new to me. I have settled on a modified Nashville system using chords instead of numbers. What approaches have worked for you?

[A1rh0pper]

I try to disect the song as much as possible and simply handwrite out something as follows:

Intro
Gm7 C - arpeggiated
Verse
Gm7 C D Em

Yada yada yada...helps me remember where my fingers are about to go...LOL. And it only takes up about half-a-sheet per song.

[rhudson]

The so called Nashville number system is very simple. It uses numbers one through seven. The numbers are substitutes for Do, Re, mi, etc., or A, B, C, etc. The name of the song and the key it is played in is usually at the top of the page. Each number represents a measure. Really a great system. Almost anyone can learn it very quickly.

[Tom S.]

Originally posted by rhudson
The so called Nashville number system is very simple.

That is what I have found best so far. By modified I mean I use chords instead of numbers since I will always play in the same key. The main value is it gets a multipage song on one page usually. I also use a plus sign to denote an 1/8 note. So for a dotted quarter note I would show it as |+ above the chord. The only shortcoming, is when I don't know the song, it is helpful to have kyrics if you get lost, but that is a pain in the neck to write in the chart.

[DickensDad]

For a long time (several years) I would take the music given me, and (like in your 6 or so pages case) condense it down to 1 or 2 sheets. The way that worked for me quite well was to re-type the Lyrics (using a larger font) in Word, and then handwriting the chords above the lyrics in the proper places, and then also adding vertical slashes to indicate where the measures were. I did this (the hand-written stuff) in red pen, to make it easier for me to see in low-light situations.

This works well, with the single exception that the chart is an original, and can only be duplicated by using a copy machine.

Recently, I've begun putting charts together (again, in MS Word) where the chords are placed in-line with the Lyrics -- like this...

• Be the |[A7]fire in my|[D2]heart, be the|[A7]wind in these|[D2]sails... (etc.)

I have set up macros to insert the chord holders in a different and slightly larger font. This works well, and I can usually get charts all on a single page. The advantage of this type of chart, (even though it takes more work to create initially) is that I can email the doc to someone, and even if they don't have the correct fonts, the chart will still be usable (that is, it may be slightly ugly, but the chords and measures are all in the right place.

I still use my older had-written method at times -- just depends on the song. I'm trying to get to do all the in-line variety...

Hope my 0.03 is worthwhile!