When I add a bar/vertical pipe to my line of chords and lyrics, the chords do not appear inline.
OnSong is designed to render chord sheets by placing chords over their respective lyrics. However there are times when you may wish to express intros or instrumental parts of your song along with basic timing information. When this is intended, OnSong has some special characters that change the placement of the chords to be inline with these special symbols.
To have a line of chords appear with measure and rhythm markers, add a vertical pipe or bar character to the line. This character looks like a straight, vertical line and is normally accessed by pressing SHIFT + \ (backslash) on a normal keyboard, just above the return or enter key. This key can be found on the iOS on-screen keyboard by tapping on the symbols and numbers key in the lower left corner, and then the symbols key just above the bottom left corner. The vertical pipe character is located just above and to the left of the space bar.
When OnSong detects this character in a line containing chords, the symbols and chords are combined to form a single line called a "chord line". These will typically contain vertical pipes/bar, slashes, colons and other symbols used to indicate timing and rhythm. However, if this line contains anything not detected to be a chord such as musical instruction, the chord line will not be formed. If the text that is included is intended to be a note about how to play the chord line progression, surround the text in parenthesis to indicate it as musical instruction. You can also change the way OnSong detects chord lines in version 2019.6 and higher by altering the
Chord Line Requires option found in
Settings >
Display Settings >
Song Formatting >
Chords >
Chord Line Requires.