How Chordzy engraves sheet music

Music engraving is the process of rendering music into sheet music: deciding where each note sits on the page and which way its stem points. The word is older than computers. Publishers once cut sheet music into metal plates by hand.

Chordzy has its own engraver, built from the ground up. That lets us customize everything about how the music looks. The fonts and symbols can change to other themes. More usefully, Chordzy can change the music itself for the person reading it, by hiding advanced features or by showing note names to new students.

We wrote the engine once, and it draws in two places. Inside the app it lays out the score you play from, then marks each note with how you played it. On the website the same layout becomes the preview images and the PDF downloads, so a printed page matches the screen.

MusicXML is the most common digital format for saving music. Notation programs such as MuseScore, Finale and Sibelius all export it.

Chordzy can understand all MusicXML files, as well as a few other formats, MEI among them. This means any sheet music can be uploaded to Chordzy, and the system can break it down into lessons for students to learn. A student gets the piece a little at a time, one hand and then the other, before putting the hands together.

Uploading your own sheet music is in testing. When it arrives, it needs a subscription, and it is for pieces you already hold a license for.