Here’s a relatively unimportant transcription style question that I’m curious about.
If the same chord is repeated for several measures, do you write it as one chord spread over those measures? If the answer is “sometimes,” what affects your decision?
I think this is somewhat debatable as the contributor guide doesn’t explicitly adress this issue. When I first started contributing, I used to do one chord per measure, as the roman numeral gets obscured by the barline when extending a chord across an even number of measures.
That being said there seems to be a consensus among more experienced contributors that merging repeated chords is the better choice and I do agree with that as reducing the amount of redundant information improves the readability of the Tab by a lot.
The only exception I would make is that I think when a chord extends across a line break it should be split in half. If the line break happens to be exactly in the middle of the chord, the roman numeral and chord symbol become unreadable and if it doesn’t, there’s no chord symbol or roman numeral for that chord in one of the lines which is very detrimental to the readability of the Tab in my opinion.
Personally I tie those chords together. The exception for me is when a new phrase starts. For example, if a song has a chord progression of C - F - G - C, with 4-bar phrasing, then I won’t tie the measure 4 chord to measure 5. I like to keep those separate to indicate when the new phrase starts.
If a song had a progression of C - F - G, where the C chord is held for two measures and the other chords for one measure, then I’d tie the C chords together.
I guess it depends on what you value more: Accuracy or readability. For a lot of pop songs, especially the newer ones, making the chord repeat once per measure (or twice per measure if there are half-measure chord changes) would usually suffice, I think. However, for the more funky songs with more complex bass lines that don’t strictly follow the chords of the song, recreating the bass line with chords, and then modifying the chords of the bass notes to also play the notes of the chords playing on top in the real song, but remove the notes that aren’t in said chord, would make more sense in my honest opinion.
In my personal opinion, for pop songs it’s always easier to read when chords which are longer than one bar are split at the next bar. Here you can easily follow along and just play the chords one bar after another:
C, C, F, C,
C, C dm, G, C
For me this is much easier than specifying that the first C should last 2 bars and the one in bar four should last 2.5 bars.
Regards!
Dennis
I usually just break the chord each measure because it’s much easier to input.
