Chords

Select a note — or a rest — and tap the Chord button in the toolbar; the chord box opens above the staff. Or tap a chord symbol already on the page to edit it.

The border tells you where you stand: green is a symbol the app understands, red is not — and a red box neither commits nor closes, so nothing you typed is lost. Fix it, or clear the box and press Return (an empty commit removes the symbol; that is also how one is deleted).

Space and Return behave as in lyrics — commit and move on — but the hyphen is an ordinary character here: C-7 is a common way to write C minor 7, and it works.

What the parser understands

Everything from C to F#m7b5 to Bb13(#11)/D. Two conventions worth knowing, both the ones chart writers use:

• A bare 9, 11 or 13 implies the flat seventh. C9 is a dominant ninth; if you want a ninth with no seventh, write Cadd9.
• The accidental binds to the root. Bb13 is B-flat thirteen, every time; the other reading is written B(♭13).

Several chords on one note

Type them comma-separated in the one box: C7, F7, G7, C7. They spread across the note’s duration in equal shares — the division a chart makes. The line commits all or nothing: one unreadable symbol and the whole line stays red (a trailing comma is fine — that is what halfway through a symbol looks like).

Chords on rests

Chord symbols can sit on rests. With a whole bar of rest there is one engraving rule to know: the rest itself is drawn centred in the bar, so the symbol anchors at the start of the bar — where The Real Book puts it. On the first symbol you write over a bar of rest, the box hops once from the centre to the barline; the result is right, the hop is just the page catching up.

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