Before posting, please read: When to use this forum, when to submit a help ticket

Super frustrated - what am I doing wrong?

Started by Bassandbeer, September 28, 2024, 12:19:01 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Bassandbeer

Spent a lot of time copying songs and chords from ultimate guitar and pasting them into Bandhelper as songs individually.

I then spent HOURS adjusting the format and spacing (in Bandhelper) for chords to be above the correct lyrics for each song and then resaving each song.

I go into the app on iOS, make sure I'm synced/updated, and when I pull up a song in a set list, the chords are NOT IN THE RIGHT PLACE!

Through a browser, they are in the correct place.

What am I doing wrong? I'm forcing the band to move forward with Bandhelper, as there are numerous advantages to using it, but a couple members are already skeptical. This doesn't help.

Hopefully an easy fix?

arlo

It sounds like you are manually positioning chords above lyrics by using spaces. For that to work consistently across devices, you would need to set Settings > Appearance > Lyrics Font to one of the monospace options, and you would need to do that before doing all the manual spacing.

A good alternative to manual positioning is to use ChordPro-style chords, embedded into the lyrics lines with square brackets. That eliminates the need for manual spacing and makes the chords follow the lyrics automatically if you edit the lyrics.

Please see steps 4-7 on this page for more info:

https://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/adding_lyrics.html

Darug

I use a website that helps convert text from Ultimate Guitar into ChordPro

https://ultimate.ftes.de/
But, follow what @Arlo says.

Bassandbeer

Thank you. I guess I did everything right, EXCEPT I made my changes before instituting one of the monospace fonts. Makes sense now why it won't work.

arlo

Okay, I just added a note about that to the Adding Lyrics tutorial.

JerryK

In case it helps, I take the UG text into Notepad, to change the square brackets from [Verse], [Chorus] etc into round ones, in just 2 find-replace passes.  This helps the other processes.  I usually remove bar-markers too but maybe that's more of a personal preference.
Next, also in Notepad, I move the chords above the word or syllable they relate to, adding spaces and/or hyphens if you like, as necessary.  Notepad, conveniently, uses a monospace font.

Next I paste that into  https://ukegeeks.com/tools/  which adds square brackets to the chords and puts them in-line, Chord-pro style, which I prefer.  BandHelper can reformat those to chords-over, per-user, for those in your band who prefer that style but not the other way round.
Paste from there to BandHelper.

Finally, I adjust some spacing or add/remove some Returns to shorten overly long lines or vertical space, and add any needed instructions.  I also like (Verse) etc and any other hints to be in Grey (always black background) so that just chords and lyrics stand out.  Any vocal replies in a different colour, possibly suiting the gender.  Pink, not purple, which can be harder to see in daylight (on black, anyway).

For backing track purposes, I have a Custom Field, describing how the song gets started, showing how many clicks, bars of this, bars of that and finally, 'vocal', when that starts.  This is part of my Duo layout(s).  It helps, certainly at my age and with hundreds of possible songs!

I wish UG chords were properly positioned (and sometimes not wrong) but that's fairly rare.

arlo

Note that the ChordPro Tools button in BandHelper can remove square brackets from non-chords (which eliminates the need to do that with a search and replace in Notepad) and can reformat manually positioned chords-over-lyrics to ChordPro-positioned chords (which eliminates the need to use the ukegeeks.com website). The same button does both functions depending on the current lyrics content.