Dave – Practicing guitar

Dave from Australia wrote:

While practicing guitar I searched for an easy, affordable way to create and store song lyric sheets. I wanted the ability to add strumming patterns, chords diagrams and tablature to my song sheets.

Fortunately while searching I stumbled across Just Chords, a free app, which fulfilled many of these needs. It’s developer, Marek Palka, was fully receptive to suggestions for improvements, quickly responding with new features and bug fixes.

Now it’s possible for me to search the web for songs, import lyrics and chords, edit and add tablature, chord progression diagrams, strumming patterns, set timing, create and share playlists and scroll song lyrics either on device screen or via Airplay to external screens. 

Creating chord progressions is a great way to learn to play a song.

For example, using Just Chords I created the chord progressions for the song “End of the Line”, by the Travelling Wilburys. It’s displayed as chords, 4 beats per bar:

Many times the lyrics available to download on the web, lack rhythm strumming patterns. It’s hard to sound original without them. I now easily create these using Just Chords rhythm format tool. See below, strumming rhthms that I created for the verses and chorus lines in the End of the Line song:

Learning to play riffs is a key part of my guitar playing. Timing the notes correctly is critical to sounding like the original recording. When I want to tab a riff I use Just Chords mono spacing format tool. It makes it easy to line everything up. I can keep it simple, or add chord names, timing and rhythm details as shown below:

Once I learn the chord progressions and riffs, I use Just Chords to project the lyrics with chord change timings shown. I have them scrolling on my iPads screen or project them to my Airplay screen while playing along on guitar.

I save my song sheets in the app, and export them as pdf files or print them out. Just Chords makes compiling my playlists to share with other players for practice or performing, a breeze.

Thank you Marek for developing Just Chords.