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The blog title is an anagram of my name.
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What I Use For Chord Chart Creation/Database
When I joined my church's worship team over a decade ago, the musicians didn't use "chord charts." We simply photocopied the piano lead sheets we took out of songbooks (which usually accompanied the latest Maranatha or Hosanna tape). The obvious drawback was that we were locked into one key; or else everyone had to pencil in a different key on each photocopy. This was piano music, mind you, with chords changing on every syllable of the song! Not easy stuff for a beginning guitar player - especially with three different penciled in sets of keys represented on the page.
When I was given the opportunity to step into leadership, I began pulling in songs from the worship bands I was listening to at the time (this was around 1997 and 1998). So I was introducing songs from Delirious and Matt Redman and stuff like that. I didn't realize it at the time, but we were shifting from piano-driven songs to guitar-driven songs. This was a big shift for the musicians, losing the lead sheets and having to improvise more with only the basic chords as a reference.
Because I picked up a lot of stuff by ear, I ended up doing what lots of young worship leaders probably did at that point: I typed out every song in Microsoft Word and kept a folder called "Chord Charts." That was my database.
Again, a big drawback was that any time we needed to change the key, I had to manually transpose and re-type every chord in my Word document. I did it that way for years and years. In fact, I still have all the folder called "Worship Chords" on my computer.
If you're still using Word as your database, THERE'S A BETTER WAY!!!
A few years ago, I started looking into a better solution for keeping a database of songs. I wasn't quite ready to invest in an expensive program, but I knew there had to be a better way. In my browsing, I discovered OpenSong.
OpenSong is free to download. It's a great tool for worship leaders that features a chord chart database, set list organizer, and presentation software packaged into one piece of software.
You should download the program and check it out. One of my favorite features is that you can click a button and transpose your songs instantly into whatever key you want.
I'm sure most worship leaders out there have moved beyond using Word to organize their chord charts, but if you're still manually re-tying songs every time you need to change the key, you should definitely consider OpenSong or a similar program.
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