We’ve improved our notation editor to make it much easier to enter lyrics. And we’ve improved chord entry too.

Lyrics

Previously, entering lyrics on Soundslice was a burden. Our interface had been designed for making small corrections to lyrics you’d imported, as opposed to entering them from scratch.

Now, it’s much faster. Here’s how it works.

First, select the starting note:

Then open the lyrics entry panel. To do this, click the “Lyrics” button in the Text section of the left sidebar, or search for “Lyrics” in our editor’s search box, or simply use the keyboard shortcut (W by default).

You’ll see something like this:

Each of those boxes represents a separate line of lyrics — i.e., for multiple verses. The top one will be selected by default.

To enter lyrics, just start typing. Your notation will automatically update with the lyric as soon as you type.

Whenever you hit the spacebar, we’ll automatically move to the next note. For a multi-syllable word, hit the hyphen character (-) at the end of the syllable; we’ll insert a hyphen and automatically move to the next note.

We’ve found this to be a really natural way of entering lyrics. And we’d love to hear your feedback — how can we make this as good as possible?

Chords

Previously, when you wanted to enter a chord using our editor, we’d give you a chord-entry interface that blocked the entire screen. Now, we’re using the same “live edit” interface that we introduced for text last week.

The biggest improvement here is with chord diagrams. You’ll now see the diagram automatically update as you enter the information — which means you’ll spot mistakes much more quickly.

Entering (or deleting) lots of chords at once? The new interface stays open until you close it — which means you can click a note, edit the chord, click another note, edit its chord, etc., without needing to manually open/close the chord interface.