Rhythm

Most lead sheets change chords no more than once or twice a bar, so Keyflow makes the common case free: a bare chord fills its whole bar. You write the progression and nothing else, and only reach for rhythm when a bar holds more than one chord. That's why you almost never type a bar line.

C  F  G  Am

Slashes mark the beats — engraved, a mix of held and strummed bars:

Four chords, four bars — one chord each. No |, no durations.

One chord, one bar

A chord with no rhythm attached lasts exactly one measure, whatever the time signature. Space-separated chords simply march one per bar:

C  F  G  Am        four bars
Gm Bb F Ab Eb      five bars

This is the measure-fill default, and everything below is how you override it when a bar needs more than one chord.

Splitting a bar: slashes

A slash / is one beat. Follow a chord with slashes to give it an exact number of beats, so several chords can share a bar:

C // G //           two chords, two beats each   (a 4/4 bar)
C / G / Em / A /     four chords, one beat each   (a 4/4 bar)

In 4/4:

So a chord lasts as many beats as it has slashes, and its symbol sits on the first of those beats. (A bare C and C //// both fill a 4/4 bar — bare is just the shorthand.) The slashes can also be written attached: C/// means the same as C / / /.

When the beats in a bar add up past the time signature, the next chord starts a new bar automatically — you never close a bar by hand.

Dotted slashes and compound meter

A dot makes a slash a dotted beat: /. is 1½ beats in 4/4. This matters most in compound meters like 6/8, where the natural pulse is a dotted quarter — two of them fill the bar:

6/8
Am /. /.            one bar, two dotted-quarter beats
C /. G /.            two chords, half a bar each

Grouping with ( )

Parentheses bind chords into one group that splits a span of time evenly. The plainest use is two chords in a bar:

G  C  (Em D)  G

That's four bars — G, C, then a bar shared by Em and D (half each), then G. Compare the group to bare chords: Em D on its own would be two bars, but (Em D) keeps them inside one.

A group divides its time equally by however many chords it holds, so odd splits fall out naturally:

(D Em G)            a triplet — three chords across one bar
(C D E F)           four chords, a beat each

By default a group fills one bar. To make it shorter, give it a target duration the same way you'd time a chord — with slashes or a note value:

(D Em)//            the pair spans two beats (one each)
(D Em G)_4          a triplet across a single quarter note

So () is a little bar-within-a-bar: whatever length you give it is shared out evenly among the chords inside.

Exact note values

When you want a specific note value rather than a count of beats, write an underscore and the value — 1 whole, 2 half, 4 quarter, 8 eighth, 16 sixteenth:

C_2 G_2             two half notes (a 4/4 bar)
C_4 F_4 G_4 Am_4     four quarter notes

Add . for a dotted value and t for a triplet:

C_4.                dotted quarter
C_8t D_8t E_8t       an eighth-note triplet

Durations stick

A duration carries forward to the chords after it, so you only write it once:

C_2 G F D            every chord is a half note — two bars

The length sticks until another duration changes it. For a default that covers a whole section (or the whole chart, if placed before any section), use /Duration:

/Duration 4          every following chord is a quarter note by default
C F G Am

A section's own /Duration overrides a chart-wide one for that section only. To give a single chord a different length without disturbing the sticky default, prefix it with !:

C_2 !G_4 F           G is a one-off quarter; F is still a half note

Repeating a bar

% repeats the previous bar exactly:

C  %  %  %           four bars of C
Am F C G  %          the four-bar phrase, then a copy of its last bar

Bar lines, when you want them

You rarely need | — the measure-fill default and the rhythms above already say where bars fall. But some people like to draw the bars in, and Keyflow reads them two ways.

Put a | before each chord and you get the familiar one-chord-per-bar layout, now with visible bar lines (spaces optional):

|G |C |Em |D         four bars, one chord each
|G|C|Em|D            the same

Or fence several chords between a pair of |, and they split that bar evenly — just like a group:

| G C Em D | F |     bar of four (one beat each, in 4/4), then a whole bar of F
| G C | Em D | F |   two half-bar pairs, then a whole-bar F

Each fenced bar divides on its own, so you can mix densities freely down a line.

What's next

• Melody — notes use the same letter-or-number naming as chords, plus these same durations.