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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.

A line with arbitrary content

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.

Bm7.. E7.. A7
_A lyric line _with positioned _chords
 
%
 
_Another one _without an immediatly preceding _chord line

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

A7 E7.. E7+..
Bm7.. E7.. A7
A lyric line without positioned chords

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:

Bm7.. E7.. A7 Bm7.. E7.. A7
_A _lyric _line _with _too _many _position _markers
%
_Another one _with too few _of them

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.

A7 %%
You don't have to be _beautiful _ to turn me _on

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.

Ah Ah Ah
:Ah Ah Ah
Fish
:Fish

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.

Ah
Ah!
:Ah