Using the LYRICS/TEXT button for showing WORDS & CHORDS

[Hugh-AR]

If you can only play from 'reading the dots' then this is not for you. But for me, so long as I know the melody of a song and have the chords laid out in front of me then I can play it. I can usually make do with just having the chords, written out in 'bars' along a line. But having the written words of a song in front of me with the chords over the top is one better as then I know at what point in the song the chords change.

What I hadn't realised, until Den pointed it out to me, is that I can have those words and chords showing on the screen in front of me. Amazing!

There is a bit about using the LYRICS/TEXT button for showing WORDS & CHORDS in the Tyros 4 Reference Manual, starting on Page 55.

[Hugh-AR]

Here is one I want to play.

Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling In Love



To accomplish what I am trying to do (to get the WORDS of the song + the written CHORDS showing on the Tyros 4 screen) there are two things involved.

1. I have to find the words and chords of the song from the internet, and
2. I have to get these into a form that will show on the Tyros 4's screen.

Looking at the second of these first (to come back to this later) the Tyros is able to read TEXT FILES. These are files that have ending .txt. There are numerous programs for you to write documents eg. WORD whose file endings are .doc or .docx. But all of these have FORMATTING in them ie. you can do BOLD, or ITALICS or UNDERLINE, and you can do COLOURS. And then there's WORD WRAP which automatically 'wraps' the words round to the next line when you get to the right hand edge of the page (remember the old days of TYPEWRITERS when we had to push the 'Carriage Return' to get the page back to the beginning?).

Well, a TEXT file has none of these .. except the 'Carriage Return', and you have to do that yourself where you want to move down to the next line. It won't 'wrap' it round automatically.

This particular program is the first that Microsoft ever produced, and is a very 'basic' letter writing program. It's FREE, is on every computer as 'standard', and because it has no 'formatting' is an Industry Standard. In particular it is used to write computer programming. And what's it called? NOTEPAD.

So here is where it is, and what the document looks like when you get it running.

Click the 'Window' (or START) in the very left hand bottom corner of your computer screen (left-click). You will get a list of all the Programs (Apps) on your computer and are looking for Windows Accessories. Click on that and you should get a drop-down box listing all the Programs in Windows Accessories.



The one you want is NOTEPAD. So click on that, and this is the document you get.



Later, we shall PASTE our words + chords into this document and SAVE it to a Memory Stick.

* Please Note * : You don't have to use NOTEPAD. The essence of all this is that you need to SAVE your file as a TEXT file (ie. ending in .txt). So whatever program you are using, when you do your Save as... make sure you choose .txt. For example, if you were using WORD, when you click on the down-arrow to choose, you will see this option.

[Hugh-AR]

Next. We need to find the WORDS & CHORDS for our song Can't Help Falling In Love.

There are several places where I look for WORDS + CHORDS (all Guitar sites .. of course!!!).

One place I often look is The Guitar Guy, and I would click on SONGS or ARTIST and then look in the Alphabet List to find something.
You don't have to join. And don't click on any Advertising LINKS

http://www.theguitarguy.com/home.htm



But my song isn't on this site. So try another one. ULTIMATE GUITAR COM
You don't have to join. And don't click on any Advertising LINKS. And bear in mind too that anything on this site that says PRO you can only get if you are a PRO MEMBER, which you have to pay for .. so choose something that is not PRO.

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/



Putting my song into the SEARCH BOX ..



... I come up with this.



The third option has had nearly 20,000 views and isn't a Pro one, so that looks like it may be the one for me.
Click on that and you get this:



That looks good. And it's in C (easy for me!). Now I need to HIGHLIGHT it and COPY it to my clipboard.

To highlight it put the mouse just to the left of the first bit of the document you want, hold the button down and drag the mouse over to the right, and downwards, going below the bottom of the page (right down, to the very bottom) so it 'scrolls down''. If you go too far you can always move the mouse back up a bit. Only release the mouse button when every bit of what you want is highlighted.



Now put your mouse cursor over the top of any of the blue highlighted bit, do a right-click and in the box that comes up do a left-click on Copy.

We're not done yet. On other sites we would be, and that text would just be 'copied'. But this is a site for Pros and they are thinking that you may want this downloaded as a PDF file. If we did (and we don't .. we just want to Copy it) we would have to pay for the privilege of being a 'Pro'. So click (left-click) on the box that says COPY PLAIN TEXT.



This 'copies' all that blue highlighted bit onto the clipboard ready for you to PASTE it where you want it.

[Hugh-AR]

Next we need to get our NOTEPAD document up and running. So do that and get it up on the screen. Click with your mouse into the document (the cursor will probably be flashing in there anyway) and do a right-click with the mouse. In the box that comes up click Paste (left click).



All that bit that was highlighted blue will now appear in the document.



As I have said previously, you don't have to use NOTEPAD to do this. You can use any letter writing program. But when you SAVE what you have done you must choose the .txt option as Yamaha keyboards can only read .txt documents.

We're not done yet because the Tyros will not show this information as you are wanting to see it. For starters, there is a lot of information there and the screen on the Tyros is quite small (compared to a computer screen). And I don't want half a Verse on one page and half on another. If there is a Chorus, then better for that to start at the top of a page.

The Tyros has a variety of letter sizes. Too small and I won't be able to read it while I'm playing. Too large and we'll only get a few words showing on the screen. I reckoned that a size of 20 was just perfect for me. So the rest of what i am saying is based on that.

The screen shows a maximum of 53 characters across. And the screen is full from top to bottom with 15 lines.

I would like to have the name of the song showing at the top, so have put that in. Then a space line. Then the word Verse. Another space line, and then the words with chords over the top. Then another space line before the next lot of words and chords. All this has to be done on the computer.

If you look at the below, this is how I have done my document. It might not be clear here where the new pages start, but take if from me that with 15 lines to a page, each new page starts on the 16th line. This is why in the below the word Chorus appears to be very close to the line above it. The word Chorus is the 16th line, so I want that at the top of Page 2. And the five blank lines after the Chorus is because I wanted the next Verse to appear at the top of Page 3. I have also managed to put on Page 3 (to remind myself) that the ending I use for this song is Ending I.

If the PDF file below does not show, refresh the page.
Or you can click the direct link to the file here.
http://www.ar-group.org/Files/Can'tHelpFalling.pdf



When you have got the wording & chords as you want them you need to SAVE the file to a Memory Stick (make sure you have one in a USB port). Click on File (at the top) and choose the Save as... option.



Make sure the file is going to end up as a .txt file; give your file a name eg. Can't Help Falling and look for the Memory Stick as the place to Save it. Remove the Memory Stick from the computer (make sure it is safe to do so).

With the Memory Stick in your Tyros 4, press the LYRICS/TEXT button.



At the bottom of the screen you will see TEXT FILE. I have used a plain 'buff' colour as my BACK GROUND (background!).



Press the button underneath the screen corresponding to TEXT FILE. Scroll across the top to USB1 (the Memory Stick), and your file should be there. Once you have found it and highlighted it by pressing the button next to it, press the EXIT button and your text/chords will show on the screen.

I'll say that again, as you may be wondering how to get your text file you have just highlighted to appear on the screen .. and it's not obvious!
Press the EXIT button and your text/chords will show on the screen.

And this is what it all looks like in my Tyros 4. Note that at the bottom of the screen it says FIXED-20, which is the size of the text. I have prepared my TEXT FILE to show on the screen assuming 20 is the text size, so any other value will not show the words correctly. If it says anything else then change it to FIXED-20 by pressing the appropriate buttons under the screen.
Use the 'Page' button top right to move across to Page 2; Page 3 etc.





Press the EXIT button again to get back to the MAIN screen to set up your song so you can play it. Every time you want the WORDS/CHORDS up on screen press the LYRICS/TEXT button; and to get back to the MAIN screen again just press the EXIT button.

I don't 'read music' so don't need the dots up in front of me. And now, thanks to Den, for the first time in my life I actually have something meaningful (to me, at any rate) up in front of me to remind me what the chords are and where they change .. and don't have to rely on 'memory' for everything I play.

I have put this TEXT file as a Download (see below) so you can download it onto a Memory Stick and see if it works in your keyboard. Click on the LINK to download it (left-click). If you have your browser set up to ask you where you want it to be downloaded, then it will ask you at this point. If not, it will automatically download it into a FOLDER called DOWNLOADS and you'll have to go and find it.

Or ...

You can do a right-click instead and choose the Save as... option. You can then choose where to put it.

In either case, don't forget that this file has been set up to show correctly on the FIXED-20 screen, so you may have to change what your keyboard is showing.

[mikeg]

Hi Hugh I found this post very interesting and had no idea this could be done. I will try to study it sometime and see if it functions on the Tyros 2 Best Regards mikeG.

[Hugh-AR]

Mike,

Thanks for that. It was quite a challenge to put this up and try and make it easy to follow. As I 'play by ear' I don't have the sheet music for most of what I play, so if I want to play something I have played before I need to know, at the very least, what key I had played it in. So I plan on doing a .txt file for all the songs I play, even if it only shows what key I play it in (plus one or two other reminders about the song?).

I have added one or two more comments into my Topic above to hopefully make it a bit clearer, and have put my TEXT File as a Download so people can try it in their keyboards. If you have a LYRICS/TEXT button on your Tyros 2 then it will definitely work.

Hugh

[Hugh-AR]

When sitting at the keyboard a couple of days ago I decided to play a song I had recorded a while ago .. Beautiful Dreamer. I remembered that I had played my own version of this and hadn't stuck to the original bar lengths, but could I remember what key I had played it in? I finally decided that I had played the piece in F, so I did that. And then I played the recording I had done. I had completely forgotten that I had actually played it in two keys, F and G, and had changed from one key to the other by playing a D7 after the F. And then I had done my own ending and not used one of the 'default' Endings in the Tyros 4. This had some 'special' chords to end with, and it took me a while to work out what I had done.

So here's a perfect case for doing one of these TEXT files .. to write out all the things I had done and have them up on the screen to remind me. Please note that I am not sticking to the WORDS of the song, so I just repeat the first Verse and Interlude for the whole song. Words are just there to remind me when the chords change.

I have looked in The Guitar Guy, but once again my song isn't listed there. So I have looked again at ULTIMATE GUITAR COM.

Putting Beautiful Dreamer into the SEARCH BOX I had a choice of several:



The second one down looked OK, so I clicked on that, and came up with:



But this is in the key of D .. and I play it in F! But I shall carry on, because I am making a document, and this isn't a sheet of music, or a PDF file, or a PICTURE file (JPG). So I can just remove all the chords that are showing in D, and replace them with my own chords in F. Again, I need to HIGHLIGHT what is on the screen and COPY it to my clipboard.

To highlight it I put the mouse just to the left of the first bit of the document, held the button down and dragged the mouse over to the right, and downwards, going below the bottom of the page so it 'scrolled down''. Then released the mouse button, put my mouse cursor over the top of the blue highlighted bit, did a right-click and in the box that came up did a left-click on Copy.



Next, up came the box that said COPY PLAIN TEXT, so I clicked on that with a left-click.



This 'copied' all that blue highlighted bit onto the clipboard ready for me to PASTE, so I have put this into NOTEPAD.



I have put the name of the song at the top; made a note of where my Split Point is (I use that G when doing an A7 chord); have put the words with a blank line in between; replaced all the chords in D with my own chords in F; made a note of what I did to change key from F to G; wrote out all the chords again so they are in G; and made a note of the chords I used for the ENDING.

*Note:* I have made sure that I have kept within 53 characters across (if you do more than that it just shows a 'squiggle' at the end of the line); and made the line after the 15th line running down (ie. the 16th line) as being the first line of the next page. This is the word Interlude. So 16 = 1, and I start counting page lines again.

Below is how I have prepared my document.

If the PDF file below does not show, refresh the page.
Or you can click the direct link to the file here:

http://www.ar-group.org/Files/BeautifulDreamer.pdf



This is now how it shows in my TEXT file, which I have put on a Memory Stick and put into the Tyros 4.

As before, I have pressed the LYRICS/TEXT button, pressed the button corresponding to TEXT FILE at the bottom, scrolled across to USB1 .. and found and pressed the button next to Beautiful Dreamer to highlight it.

To get the file showing on the screen press the EXIT button.

And this is what it all looks like in my Tyros 4.







Press the EXIT button again to get back to the MAIN screen. I'll probably want to set the keyboard up to play it by finding my REGISTRATION for Beautiful Dreamer. You can get back to the text showing on the screen by pressing the LYRICS/TEXT button.

Should be enough information in there to remind me how I had played it when I did the recording .. which I did like this:

Beautiful Dreamer played on Tyros 4



If you wat to see how this TEXT file looks in your keyboard, click on the LINK below.

[attic2007]

Thanks Hugh

This is something I've often wondered about and your detailed instructions have been extremely useful