FAQ: How to generate lyrics with chords display if your MIDI keyboard does not support chords

Some higher priced keyboards (often called work stations) display score and chords above lyrics. Yamaha keyboards or pianos need the chords in PSR XF Format. GNMIDI Professional 3 can generate chords and edit chords in this format.
Some video display machines use a sysex format to display chords and lyrics (e.g. Wordbox sysex). The reason is that MIDI standard does not transfer meta commands through MIDI cable and so only a system exclusive command (syex) can transfer text of different kind (chords, lyrics) to the device. GNMIDI Professional 3 can generate chords and edit chords in this sysex format.

Unfortunately there is no standardized chord format published by MMA (MIDI Manufacturing association). Only for standard lyrics there is a specification.
Chords are usually available at certain bar positions (e.g. at some bar beginnings or at some bar center positions or at some beat positions). These positions usually are conflicting with lyric positions where lyric words could be available at any position so that chords are often between lyric syllables in middle of words.
Displaying such a MIDI file using a device that does not display chords separately causes a chaos display with chords hardly to read and mixed with lyrics.

bad chord display when chords are not supported
GNMIDI Professional 3 identifies chords of different formats and displays them separately in an own line above lyrics.

GNMIDI 3 displays chords above lyrics

If a software or lyric display device supports fixed fonts then the chords can be placed in an own line above lyrics and positioned using space characters. A GNMIDI Professional 3 operation can produce this using conversion to "chords above lyrics".
Unfortunately most devices do not allow to change font and use a proportional width font (each character has other width).
After this conversion the chords and lyrics are lines (no syllables).

BONMIDI music

(c) by www.bonmidi-music.de (2017)

Melodie der Heimat

Musik und Text: bonmidi music

    G           D
Der Melodie der Heimat
    C            G
hör ich so gerne zu
     C                   G
dann fühl ich mich nicht einsam
     C                      D
mein Herz kommt schnell zur Ruh
    G                D
Bin ich auch nicht zuhause
   C                G
so denk ich stets daran
    C                G
wie es so schön doch wäre
     D           G
wenn alles ruhen kann
    G                     D
Die Liebsten in der Ferne wissen
                   G
beim ersten Glockenschlag
      G                      D
die Gedanken ja sie gehn auf Reisen
                   G
und spielen mit im Takt

(converted using GNMIDI to chords lines above lyric lines)

GNMIDI Professional 3 contains a conversion of chords and lyrics to formatted lyrics using method "Chords between lyrics". Some options allow to configure the displaying of chords for users preference:

• chords can be moved in front of lyrics words for better readability
• the original chord symbols can be removed e.g. [...]
• the chord names can be enclosed by <...> for better distinguishing against lyric syllables
• the chord names can be surrounded by spaces

after GNMIDI 3 converting using lyrics
This conversion is available in GNMIDI 3 version 3.18 and can be tried with demo.

Contact: info@gnmidi.com