The chart MultiTracks sent for “Amazing!” had every chord and every lyric on it and not one bar line. That is normal. A lyric chart is built for the singer. It tells the guitar player which chord, and roughly where, and leaves the counting to you.
Our band reads Nashville number charts: numbers over a four-slash grid, one box per bar, repeat signs, a diamond on the final hold. So I gave Claude the MultiTracks PDF, one of our existing charts as the reference format, and a short list of conventions. About forty minutes later I had a one-page Nashville number chart for “Amazing!” in Gb at 145 BPM, as a PDF and an editable Word document. Roughly 90% of the bars were right. The 10% that were wrong were the same bars I would have had to check against the recording no matter who wrote the chart.
✦ KEY FACTS
A MultiTracks lyric chart carries the chord and its position in the lyric, but no bar lines. The number mapping is exact; the bar grid has to be inferred.
Two songs took one afternoon: “Amazing!” (Elevation Rhythm, Gb, 145 BPM, one page) and “For Christ Alone” (2819 Worship, Cm, 75 BPM, two pages).
The first draft of “Amazing!” was about 90% correct. Every wrong bar was a section length or a split bar, never a wrong number.
One sanity check catches most miscounts: bar count times seconds per bar should land close to the song length.
Why a lyric chart is not enough on stage
MultiTracks charts are good at what they do. The chords are correct and the sections are labeled. The band cues are the most useful part of the page: “Band in at bar 5”, “Break on beat 3”, “Tom groove”, “Building at bar 7”. What the chart does not give you is the count. When the drummer is playing a tom groove and the singer is holding a note, “the 4 goes under the word ‘grace'” is not a thing I can read at a glance.
A number chart fixes that because the page is the count. Four slashes per bar, one box per bar, and the number sits above the beat where the chord changes. You can read it from across the stage with the lights down. It also transposes for free, which matters when the key changes at Tuesday rehearsal.
Settle the conventions before the first bar
The reference chart did most of the work here. I sent Claude our “What a God” chart and said: this format, exactly. Then I spelled out the rules that a chart reader would otherwise have to guess.
Minor chords are bare numbers. The 6, the 2 and the 3 are minor in a major key, everyone knows it, so no “m”. Any sus chord is the number plus “s”, so 1s and 4s, without spelling out sus2 or sus4. Add2 chords get the plain number, because on these charts Cb2 and Cbsus2 are near interchangeable voicings of the 4. Slash chords are number over bass number: Db/F in Gb is 5/7, Gb/Bb is 1/3. Bass walkdowns get written as four numbers in one bar, so G F Eb D under “until the end of time” becomes 3 2 1 7.
The one rule I had to think about was the minor key. “For Christ Alone” is in Cm. You can number it against C minor and call Cm the 1, but nobody in our band reads that way. Numbering against the relative major, Eb, turns the verse into 6 4 1 5, which is a shape every worship guitarist already has under their fingers. So: minor-key songs are numbered against the relative major, and Cm is a 6.
Two quirks of the source format also needed a rule. Empty section boxes on a MultiTracks chart mean an instrumental pass, not a missing section. And a lyric line with no chord above it means the previous chord keeps going.
ON THE CHART
CHORUS "Amazing" (final, after the check) | 6 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 1 5/7 | PRE CHORUS | 1 | 1s | 1 | 1s | REFRAIN 2 | 2 1/3 | 4 | 6 5/7 | 1 | ENDING | 6 | 5 | 4 | ◆ |
Let the draft flag its own guesses
This is the part that made the whole thing worth doing. Before writing anything, Claude pointed out that the lyric chart gives chord and lyric position but no bar lines, so the bar counts would be inferred. I asked it to mark every inferred bar with a blue question mark in the Word document. That turned the review into a targeted pass. Instead of re-reading the whole chart against the recording, I listened for the twelve bars with a mark on them.
The band cues from the MultiTracks chart went under each section header in small gray italics. The reference format has no slot for them, but they are too useful to lose, and the “at bar N” cues double as a check on section length. If the source says “Building at bar 7” and the draft section has six bars, something is off before you press play.
Consecutive identical sections got merged into repeat signs with the second-time cue noted, so “Amazing!” fit on one page. Then I opened the Word doc, played the track, fixed the flagged bars, deleted the question marks, and exported the PDF.
What the draft got wrong, and why that is fine
Four things, all in “Amazing!”, and every one of them a bar count.
The chorus was drafted with a split first bar, “6 5”, when the actual chorus is one chord per bar. Chorus 2 and Refrain 1 are seven bars, not eight; they end on the 4 and go straight into the next section. The pre chorus alternates every bar, 1 then 1s then 1 then 1s, not 1 then two bars of 1s. And the ending is 6, 5, 4, diamond.
The bridge, Refrain 2 and the entire number mapping were right as drafted. No chord was ever wrong. Every mistake was a length, and section length is exactly what a musician has to confirm by ear anyway. The draft did the transcription and the layout; I did the part that needs a pair of ears.
No chord was wrong. Every miss was a bar count, and bar counts are the part you check by ear no matter who wrote the chart.
“For Christ Alone” is still unchecked against the recording. Two pages, 75 BPM, more inferred bars because the song breathes more. I expect a similar ratio, but I have been wrong about slow songs before.
The tooling, in case you want to copy it
The chart itself is built by a small Python script using python-docx. Calibri for the headers, Courier New for the grid, a red run on beat 1 of every bar, a blue run for the question marks. LibreOffice converts the Word file to PDF. Song data is just a list of sections, each a list of bars, each bar a list of chords, so adding a song is data entry rather than code. It is the same way I let Claude handle the mechanical parts of this site, described in how I let Claude run my website. Settle the format once, then hand over the repetitive part and keep the judgment for yourself.
The scripts live in my session scratch folder for now. If this becomes a weekly thing they move into a proper repo, and a blank template ends up as a download on the music page next to the rest of what I play. The other things I build are on the projects page.
The repeatable Nashville number chart workflow
Give Claude the reference chart and the source chart. Ask for reasoning and a plan before it writes anything. State the conventions: bare numbers for minor chords, “s” for sus, plain numbers for add2, number over bass for slash chords, relative major for minor keys, empty boxes are instrumental, no chord means the last chord holds. Ask for a question mark on every inferred bar. Carry the band cues under the section headers. Merge repeats. Then listen, fix the marked bars, and export.
Questions people ask
Can Claude read a MultiTracks chart PDF directly?
Yes. I attached the lyric chart PDF as-is, along with a reference chart in the format I wanted, and it read both. The number mapping came out exact; only the bar counts needed checking.
Why number a minor-key song against the relative major?
Because the band reads it faster. A song in Cm numbered against Eb reads as 6 4 1 5, a shape every worship guitarist already knows. Numbered against C minor, the same progression reads as 1 6 3 7 and slows everyone down.
How do you write sus and slash chords on a Nashville number chart?
Sus chords are the number plus “s”, so 1s or 4s. Slash chords are number over bass number, so Db/F in the key of Gb is 5/7. Minor chords in a major key are bare numbers with no “m”.
How long does one chart take?
About forty minutes for a one-page song, including the listen-through to fix the flagged bars. The first draft is a few minutes; the check against the recording is most of the time.
✦ Written from the music room. More notes here.