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I have seen these diagrams in books. They display the strings of the guitar and the locations of the notes I want to present, as well as the name of the chord/scale/etc. You can see what I mean in the picture below:

Example photo

Is there a specific tool or maybe software that does this? I really don't want to do this by hand or some makeshift method because that would take way too long. I also want to know how to include these into my book. It will be an e-book for sure, just so you know, and I want to include these diagrams as well as explanations (text material) for the final package. I want it to look organized in the format of an e-book.

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Daniel
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3 Answers3

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I hacked together a simple website to create chord charts online (.png and .svg images): https://chordpic.com.

The use case of this website is if you don't want a million features but just want to create some simple charts very quickly. I created this site to replace the website chordpix.com which recently went dead.

It asks you to name the chord (optional, this is shown on the top of the chart), give the starting fret (fret 1 by default), and the number of frets (5 by default).

Then you simply click on the strings to add a finger there. To add a barre chord (basically a finger over multiple strings) you can simply click and hold the mouse button and "drag" to any other string to create a bar reaching over the strings.

This is all explained in detail with animated gifs on the help page at https://chordpic.com/help

ChordPic is not as sophisticated as other tools. It will not figure out the chord or provide you with alternative chords or anything like that. The main goal of this tool is really to simply create a chord chart very easily and however you want it. It will also not prevent you from eg. putting multiple fingers on the same string. Think of it as the Notepad of chord chart editors. Yes, there's also Microsoft Word that offers you spell checking and numerous formatting options. But sometimes you just want to write some text quickly without any fancy features.

omnibrain
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This may be a bit late but check out https://www.essyguitartab.com/chords. This is a free tool where you can choose from named chords or build your own and add them to a chart that you can then print or export to PDF. I'm not exactly sure of your needs but hopefully the PDFs will give you enough resolution to use the diagrams any way you need to.

S Cherry
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There are music typesetting programs out there that let you create these types of diagrams. Most music software allows you to create TABs,but not chord diagrams. One which appears to allow both is LilyPond. I haven't tried it myself, but its website shows a picture with the chord diagrams, and it is free.

I have watched my son use professional (yet free) software that allowed you to specify page breaks in scores for different instruments, etc. but it was essentially a mark-up language. (He is away so I can't ask him what it was.)

S. Mitchell
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