Guide

Chart files

Text charts and PDFs are the two kinds of song. On disk a text chart may use several extensions. Stagehand reads them with one parser and does not convert a file from one style to another when you edit it.

What you can open

ChordPro

Directives sit in braces. Chords sit in square brackets in the lyric. A chord belongs to the character that follows the closing bracket.

{title: Amazing grace}
{artist: John Newton}
{key: G}
{tempo: 90}
{time: 3/4}
{topic: worship, hymn}
{start_of_verse}
A[G]mazing [C]grace
{end_of_verse}
{start_of_chorus}
[G]How [D]sweet the [G]sound
{end_of_chorus}

Known section directives become section badges. A comment directive can sit under a rhythm line. A tab block stays monospaced and does not wrap.

A bracket can hold a bar pattern. [Bm / A/C# / |D / Em7 / |Gmaj7 / D/F# A |Bm / / / ] is drawn in that order, with the written spacing. A slash set apart by spaces is a beat, and a bar line may touch a chord.

Runs of spaces before chords are musical. This intro is four beats of space, not messy formatting, and Stagehand keeps it:

[C]    [F]      [G]  [Am]

Plain text and OnSong

If the file does not open with a brace, the lines up to the first blank line are a header.

• A Name: value line for a known field becomes metadata. Key:, Tempo: and Time: are the usual ones.
• Otherwise the first line is the title and the second is the artist.
• A line that already contains [ is a lyric, even in the header area, so a chart that starts on a chord does not lose its first line.

A section label is a line that ends with a colon and starts with a known word: verse, chorus, bridge, intro, outro, tag, interlude, solo, refrain, vamp, coda or turnaround. The label is shown as you wrote it, including a number such as Verse 1:. A lyric that happens to end with a colon, such as and he said to me:, is not treated as a section.

Welcome To Stagehand
Stagehand Team
Key: C
Tempo: 85
Time: 4/4

Verse 1:
to get [C]started with the app, [F]tap Songs

Chorus:
[C]Charts stay [G]on the device

Line formatting in the file

A one-character prefix formats that whole line. This is content the writer chose.

*bold a line of lyrics
/or italicize it
!or do both
&red:or make it red
>yellow:even highlight it in yellow

File versus the Format tab

Keep these apart.

• Line prefixes are content. They travel with the file when you send it to someone.
• The Format tab is your preference. It styles lines that do not carry their own format, and it stays on your device.

A line that sets a colour still inherits size and weight from the panel. Target key, capo and zoom are never written into the file.

Text direction

Stagehand draws Arabic and Hebrew right to left and everything else left to right. You do not have to say which: each line follows its own first letter, and chords are not letters. A line with no words, such as an intro of chords, follows the lines around it.

• A song that is English with one Arabic section draws that section right to left. An Arabic song with an English tag draws the tag left to right.
• An English phrase inside an Arabic line still reads left to right.
• A chord is placed over the letter it was written before, with room for its whole name. A row of chords with no words is read from the right.
• To force a whole chart, write {direction: rtl} or {direction: ltr} (Direction: rtl in a plain-text header). This is part of the file and travels with it.
• Section labels such as كوبليه, لازمة and جسر are recognised as sections.

PDF

A PDF is displayed as the page. Transpose, chord style and the Format tab are disabled, with a reason. Title, artist, key and topics for a PDF live in the library index. Use them so search and the by-key index can find the song. They do not alter the PDF bytes.

A PDF and a ChordPro chart for the same song can both be attachments. The tick marks the one you are reading.