If you are like me and write your songs on guitar, you virtually never create chord charts for your songs. I was busy working out lyrics, cadence, and my own stylistic variations of the song. Basically, I write songs to perform them not document them.
With Qwikchord, that has changed.
I am forming a band and being able to have ready prepared chord charts that are more precise and, quite frankly, professional, was suddenly more important to me.
Also, as my catalog grew, the thought of going back and charting those songs became more daunting.
So a month ago I searched Google and found Qwikchord. (see bottom of article for video demo)
I started off by downloading the free version. The very simple and intuitive interface had me using it immediately.
Within a day or so I went back and purchased the full version – a whopping $12.95. I wanted to check at all the features including: saving list of favorite chords and alternate tunings support, among others. But also, I wanted to support the developer, Lonnie West.
It is one of the most effective and easy to use tools I use. And finally, my songs are becoming much easier to pass along to other players.
How it works:
Start quick chord and you are presented the virtual fretboard and tools.
Click on the virtual fretboard to build your chord, designating which strings are opened, fretted, or un-played, and Qwikchord shows you the chord and its name.
Press <Ctrl +C> to copy and switch to your favorite word processor and press <Ctrl +V> to paste and voila!!! A graphic of your chord is placed in the document.
Return to Qwikchord and repeat the process and soon all chords and variations for your song are available in the document. You can then refer to them by name above your lyrics or place the actual chord diagrams themselves by copying them to the appropriate areas.
Three are a number of other helpful features and I’ve begun playing with those. Additionally, their support has been quick to respond to email questions and other comments.
I have a background in software development and have suggested a few features as well.
- a capo/transpose feature
- save a song (all chords in a song as a single file you can open and edit).
But one of the key features of Qwikchord and a big part of its appeal, is that it does what it does and NOT everything else.
I don’t really have a star rating system in place here at The Songwriter Online but if I did, Qwikchord would get a 4 out of 4.
The Qwikchord team recently released a Mac version of the software.
Here is a video demo of QwikChord and adding chord diagrams to a Microsoft Word document.
Songwriter, author, and consultant. Writing about tools I use or I have watched others use successfully. 
