Writing a Chart

Whether you have to learn some songs quickly, you are writing down your own music or sharing something with another musician, being able to write out an effective chart is an invaluable skill. For me, writing charts for songs helps me internalise the material better and learn music quicker – I also think it shows a more professional stance than just relying on a potentially incorrect chord sheet from the internet. 

However, it is not as simple as just writing the chords on a piece of paper and calling it a day. There are some generally agreed on best practices for writing out charts, but you will also inevitably discover some of your own methods, or personal preferences, along the way. 

Before we go any further, this blog post is not to help you create beautiful transcriptions or anything that can be monetised; we are looking at writing a chart to simply help you through the gig.

Why Write a Chart?

As discussed above, writing something out helps me memorise the music better and faster, but your mileage may vary. The key points here will be that you then have a record of the song for future reference, that fact that you can have worked on it yourself means that it is more likely to be correct and you also have the freedom to notate any arrangement changes made to the music perhaps not found in the original.

However, the better question is ‘who is this chart for?’. If it is just for yourself, you can write it however you like – if drawing a picture of a cat helps you remember the song then it is doing the job it was designed to do; random sketches would not help the next musicians along, though!

What Do You Need?

At a bare minimum you need a blank piece of paper and a pencil (because I always make at least one mistake inevitably), but if you are going down the hand written route, I would suggest some blank manuscript paper, just in case you do need to notate part of a melody. For many years now, I have used MuseScore, which is free and has more features than you would ever need – my favourite amongst which is the ability to export as PDF, ready to send straight to my tablet. This is a common feature amongst similar programs, but is still my favourite!

You also need a good ear, but you can manage if you can at least tell the difference between various chord families, higher and lower and common rhythm practices. The most important is clearly needing a song to work on, be it your own composition or something you are learning.  

A chart itself needs to follow certain rules, but I will not go into detail for the reasons for each of them. This is because all of them are there to facilitate the whole process, be it easier to read or more explicit when describing what is required from you.

A good chart needs:

• As often as possible, an even number of bars per line,

• Clear use of repeats, sections and road-mapping instructions,

• Detailed chord boxes if specific voicings are required,

• Same as above but with rhythm – slash marks are great if you know what the rhythm should be, or if it is not important,

• Easy to read title with the correct key, tempo and other text instructions.

Whilst there are bound to be things that I have missed from this list, and perhaps you are shouting at the screen as you read this, what is included will stand you in good stead. 

Don’t Forget

There are a few important things that are worth learning about if you do not have a comfortable working knowledge already. I will go over some of them in brief detail and the rest I may cover in a separate post in the future, if you need any more explanation then you can ask your teacher or have a look online.

Repeats

This encompasses all the commonly used techniques for navigating your way through a chart. These symbols and markings might direct you to a specific place within the piece, or simply highlight a section to be repeated without much though. Please see below for the most commonly used symbols, as compiled by Musescore 4 due to their frequency of use. 

Slash Marks

Sometimes you will find a song has a strumming pattern that is ambiguous enough to begin with that you can play something close and it be sufficient, you know the pattern already/the pattern has already been established or the song does not need a written pattern at all (this is common with jazz standards). It might also be the case where there are only a couple of specific rhythms throughout a piece, and in this case, you might see a hybrid of slash marks and rhythm notation, possibly even some notes for a specific melodic part – see the example below!

Clear Information

As well thought out music theory is, or considering all the different ways you can write down something musical, there will always be something that you cannot convey through conventional means. If you are writing something out by hand, then you can simply add a note and all notation software programs allow you to add any text that you like. The best piece of advice here is to make it short, clear and understandable if you come back to it after a while (or someone else reads it!).

Final Thoughts

When I was at university, one of my peers posed the idea that no-one ever gets taught how to read a badly written chart. This was partly because we had excellent instruction in writing charts for ourselves, but also because if we were given charts they were either from a reputable source or written by the tutor themselves. This thought stuck with me and it became abundantly clear over the course of the ensuing years that bad charts are everywhere! You simply have to experience it and try to envision what the author may have been trying to represent. 

Being able to create and understand a written record of the music that you play is very important, and having a library of my own charts that I can quickly add to has helped me so many times – get your pens out!