What Is ChordPro Format and How Do Musicians Use It?

If you've ever tried to read a chord chart on stage and found yourself counting spaces to figure out where the G comes in, ChordPro is for you. It's a simple, widely used format for song charts that keeps chords and lyrics together in a way that's both human-readable and software-renderable.

What Is ChordPro?

ChordPro is a plain-text format for chord charts. Chords are written inline with the lyrics, inside square brackets, immediately before the word or syllable they fall on. For example: [G]Somewhere [C]over the [G]rainbow.

When rendered by a ChordPro-compatible app, the chords float above the lyrics at the right position. The result is a clean, professional-looking chart that's much easier to read than chords stacked above lines separately.

Why Musicians Use It

ChordPro has been around since the late 1980s and has become a standard across the music community. Thousands of apps support it, so a ChordPro-formatted chart can be moved between apps without reformatting.

For working musicians, the main advantages are portability and readability. Charts look consistent. They resize cleanly on screen. They work equally well on a tablet in portrait mode and a phone propped up on a keyboard.

ChordPro in Dashplan

Dashplan's Setlist Manager supports ChordPro natively. Add your charts in ChordPro format and they render with the chords floating above the correct syllables. In Live Mode, charts are displayed full-screen for easy reading on stage. You can import lyrics automatically and add chord markup manually — no need to type the entire chart from scratch.