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Writing lyrics

Lyrics lines

Any line that is not a chord line is considered a lyric line, with a few exceptions such as time signature or section labels declarations.

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Lyrics lines do not exhibit any specific behavior except when they contain chord position markers.

Chord position markers

The _ character can be used to specify where the chords of the immediately preceding chord line should be played.

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If the lyric line does not contain any position marker, then the chords are aligned with other chord lines:

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If the lyric line has more position markers than chords to position, then the extra ones are ignored. If it has less, then the remaining chords are displayed at the end of the line:

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Chords spawning multiple bars

This is one of the few cases where writing songs in ChordMark actually requires a bit of extra work compared to other formats. If the same chord is played over multiple bars, you will need to add a position marker for each one of those bars. This (minimal) extra effort result in much better clarity on lyric placement, though.

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Forced lyric lines

There are a few - rare - cases where ChordMark might interpret a lyric line as a chord line. When this occurs, you can force a line to be detected as lyric by adding the : symbol at the begining.

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Note that you could also add any other character to the line to force the lyric detection. The only difference is that the : will be hidden at rendering time.

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