Rant on:
I know I’m fighting windmills here, but I have to say it anyway…
I wish this fairly useless “music notation” would just go away.
I know it won’t, though…
Rant off.
It’s a form of notation for people who can’t read music or who simply want to know what the chords are in a song.
It’s not bad practice - it works.
I understand, using it every day, being a teacher.
Still, without YouTube, it’s useless.
Anyway, let’s move on. It’s one of the things that I really wish the team wouldn’t spend resources on.
But then, we all have different needs…
So, have at it! 
Cheers,
Benji
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This type of chart helps that one musician who does not read music keep up with the rest of the band who are reading music.
I could not possibly disagree more. These sorts of charts are absolutely essential to a pretty big group of musicians. I would love to be able to make them natively in Dorico.
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Did you see my model?
Dan, but wouldn’t you agree that this style charts does not per se constitute “notation” since it’s missing two out of three of the elements of music?
It does not give any indication of the melody or the rhythm of the accompaniment, not even the placement of harmonic events with respect to the time signature.
It falls back to an oral, non-written era of musical information, where you have to “know the song” in order to play it.
Much of this is due to a lack of available typesetting for musical information in simple songbooks, when you had to be able to “write” down a song just using a typewriter…
ASCII tabs on the internet fall into the same category, by the way…
I have nothing against people that don’t read music and couldn’t participate in musical activities otherwise, but for me as an educator it’s frustrating to deal with this, especially since it’s very easy to make proper leadsheets these days.
I always point these shortcomings out to my students, and it takes them 5 minutes to comprehend that even if you can’t read the melody in an actual lead sheet, you are able to easily play the chords on the correct beats and get a sense of the form and structure of the tune.
Anyway, it’s all good, if Steinberg wants to add this function, I’m sure there are many people for whom this would be very useful.
B.
I’d think of this “Chord & Lyrics notation” as just another format in line with lead sheets and TAB notation for fretted instruments, a way to meet individual needs/playing/reading techniques where the performers are.
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Doesn’t slash notation also leave out a lot of ‘essential’ musical information? Or, for that matter, medieval neumes, Gregorian chant, a jazz score, ornate baroque music, song texts written “to the tune of…”, or aleatoric modern music? They all depend on extra-notational knowledge and traditions (yes, even the aleatory).
For me, this chords-only type of lead sheet is very much a valid form of music notation (which I personally never use, but that’s not the point).
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The very fact that many people use it proves (tautologically) that it’s useful. If nothing else, one can think of it simply as a mnemonic aid — a shorthand to jog one’s musical memory. Is that really such a bad thing?
As someone who spent decades being a music educator (composition, music theory, and jazz performance), I certainly recognize the advantages of nurturing musical-notation literacy. (Among other things, it makes the teaching of large ensembles more efficient — the post-Industrial Revolution model of pedagogy.) But I also discovered that it can be limiting.
I was able to help in a limited time high-school-age students with little or no background in reading music to compose interesting short scores to film or theater scenes (with developed leitmotifs and Neo-Riemannian harmonic relationships) precisely by eschewing standard notation and using the keyboard, the chromatic circle notated both as 0–11 and as letter-names, and shorthand notation of the type discussed here. It actually enabled far deeper creativity than had I taken the time to do the sorts of music-reading teaching they would have gotten earlier in elementary and band/choir/orchestra classes. And in turn — I hope, I believe — led a few young people to start noticing more things in the film and video-game scores they hear all the time.
''But wait, there's more…'':
Though we are obviously all here precisely because we believe in the value of written musical notation (and the level of detail and specificity it can make possible), I would hope that none of us is comfortable taking that so far as to be dismissive of countless millennia of oral-tradition music-making, storytelling, etc. And I respectfully suggest that your use of “useless,” “fall back,” “proper,” and “shortcomings” do, in fact, belie your claim of having “nothing against” oral-tradition musical practice.
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Alright, I yield… 
Thanks for taking the time to educate me! 
It’s all good, and I take back some of the more dismissive terms I’ve used, I’m sorry!
Back to the task at hand…
Love,
benji
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