If you have collected chord sheets for any length of time, you have a folder of text files that all look the same: a line of chord names, then the words underneath, the two held together by a row of spaces. It is the oldest format on the internet and it works perfectly until the moment anything about the display changes.

Converting that to ChordPro takes one paste. What follows is what the conversion is doing, so you can tell when it has got it wrong.

The short version

Paste the sheet into the free ChordPro converter and read the result. It runs in your browser, there is nothing to sign up for, and nothing is uploaded.

That is genuinely the whole procedure. The rest of this article is about the part nobody tells you: the conversion is a guess, and you should know which guess it is making.

What changes, exactly

Here is a sheet in the format almost everything is published in:

Am                   F
The last bus home is late
    C            G
and I am singing anyway

And the same thing as ChordPro:

[Am]The last bus home is [F]late
and [C]I am singing [G]anyway

The chord names have not changed and the words have not changed. What changed is what the chord is attached to. In the first version F is at column 21 and happens to have "late" underneath it. In the second it is in the line, immediately before the word it belongs to.

That is the whole idea, and every useful thing follows from it. A chord tied to a syllable can be transposed, capo'd, reflowed on a phone, or reprinted at any size, and it stays over the word it was always over. A chord tied to column 21 survives none of those.

The guess the converter is making

To convert a sheet, something has to decide which lines are chords and which are words. There is no marker — both are just text.

The rule is: a line is a chord line if every token on it parses as a chord name. That gets it right nearly always, and nearly is the interesting part. A line reading A on its own could be a chord or the first word of a sentence. A line of Do Re Mi is three chords in Italian notation and three syllables in English.

So the conversion is a heuristic. It is a good one, and it will still be wrong on some sources — which is why the converter shows you the output instead of handing you a file, and why the import screen inside the app keeps the converted song editable before it saves anything.

How to check it in five seconds

Read the output and look at where the brackets landed. You are checking one thing: is each chord immediately before the syllable you actually change hands on?

The failure has a signature. A misaligned source produces brackets inside words — hom[F]e, sing[C]ing — because the chord's column fell in the middle of a word rather than at its start. If you see that, the original sheet's spacing was off by a few characters, and the fix is to nudge the chord line in the input rather than to fight the output.

Things that are not chord sheets

A few kinds of file look close enough to confuse a converter and are worth knowing about:

  • Tab. Six lines of e|---3---0--- are not chords above words, and converting them as if they were produces nonsense. A good converter leaves tab rows alone; this one does.
  • Lyrics with no chords at all. Nothing to convert — the words come through unchanged, which is the right answer rather than an error.
  • Something already in ChordPro. Also nothing to do. The converter says so instead of bracketing the brackets.

More than one song in the paste

ChordPro marks a song's start with a {title: …} directive, which means a file holding a whole songbook can be split on those boundaries without guessing. If you paste several songs at once, the converter will say how many it found, and importing the same paste into Strumfolio splits them into separate songs rather than one very long one.

A note for people leaving another app

If your sheets came out of OnSong, MobileSheets or SongbookPro, they may already be ChordPro — but in that app's own dialect, where the same directive means different things. {a: …} is the artist in OnSong and the album in MobileSheets. {st: …} is a subtitle in the specification and was redefined by OnSong to mean the artist.

Read with the wrong table, each of those puts a correct value under the wrong heading, silently. It is worth checking that whatever you import with knows the difference — Strumfolio's importer does, and refuses to guess when nothing identifies the source.

Why bother at all

Because the file outlives the app. A .chopro file is plain text: it opens in any editor, it goes into version control, and it will still be readable when the app you typed it in has changed hands or names or gone. That argument is worth its own article, and it has one.