Off-topic code: Chord transposer & tablature display tool
I play bass guitar, but I'm not yet good enough to transpose a song in my head when the band switches keys. So I went looking for a (free!) lightweight tool to not only quickly pull up chord charts and tablature to songs in my repertoire (to save time flipping pages) but to transpose the charts up or down as required, thus keeping me from having to think ;)
Since I couldn't find anything to fit the bill, I decided to write a simple Windows app to do so for me, and thought I'd share it in case anyone else might find it useful.
Here are screenshots of what I came up with (click the images for larger view):
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| Windows XP version |
Windows Vista version, with Aero! |
It's not fancy, and it doesn't do much, but it's quick and does what I needed it to do. It reads from simple text files, populating the drop-down list with all the songs in the directory, and you can navigate to any song by just starting to type the name and hitting "Enter". The "Up" and "Down" transpose buttons in the upper right transpose the chord chart up or down (D to Eb, Eb to F, C# to C, etc.), and a label will show you how far up or down it's been transposed. The tablature, if present for the song, is not transposed - that was way more work than I wanted to do...
The files are listed below. The "bin" files are compiled and ready to run, just add chord charts and tabs, and the "src" files include the full source files for the program. Not much, but there it is! These are VisualStudio 2008 projects, but I compiled for version 2.0 of the .NET framework rather than 3.0 or 3.5. Also, these files have the window size set for 1024x768 screens, so if you have a larger or smaller display, you can change the window & control sizes and recompile. I use it at 1680x1050 for my laptop.
| XP Version: |
Vista Version: |
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The code & compiled proggies are supplies as is with no warranties, etc. You know the drill.
Many thanks to http://i-cons.tk for the icon, and to Pang Wu, from whose article ("Drawing smooth text and pictures on the extended glass area of your WinForm in Windows Vista") I lifted the GlassText.cs class.
