The Lyrics Track contains text for the lyrics of the song.  It is usually assumed that the melody for the lyrics will be in the Melody track.

Segment Sheet

Editing lyrics is a little different from using normal text.

Each syllable is located at a particular place in the song and is contained in a separate event, surrounded with a gray border.

Long or rapid lyrics may involve much text in a small space, so text can be compressed horizontally to make it fit the duration of the events.

You can still type the lyrics into lyric segments as continuous text.  Songtrix takes care of breaking the syllables into events whenever you type a space or hyphen.

Staff Sheet

Lyrics appear above the staves in the staff sheets (or possibly between staves for Staff Sheet reports).

The locations of the lyric events are reflected exactly in the placement of the lyrics on staff.  In the example, all syllables are aligned over their melody note except "these", whose event was slightly misplaced in the picture at the top.

Lyrics Setup

The Track Setup window for the Lyrics track contains only the Layout page.

This offers options for adjusting the sizing and compression of lyric text events in the workspace, and also how you want text formation to be managed in Lyric Sheet reports.

Lyric Text

All the usual text characters can be used in lyrics, but there are several characters which have special functions for controlling text formation in Lyric Sheet reports, depending on your Lyrics track setup.

• Commas ( , ) indicate the end of a line in Lyric Sheet reports.

• Periods ( . ) indicate the end of a line in Lyric Sheet reports.

• Question Marks ( ? ) indicate the end of a line in Lyric Sheet reports.

• Exclamation Marks ( ! ) indicate the end of a line in Lyric Sheet reports.

• Hyphens ( - ) indicate syllables which are part of the same word as the following event.  These syllables are rejoined into words (and the hyphen removed) in Lyric Sheet reports if space permits.

• Underscores ( _ ) indicate syllables which are part of the same word but are explicitly repeated for musical effect.  These are converted to hyphens in Lyric Sheet reports.

• Square Brackets ( [ ) cause the start of a new line in Lyric Sheet reports, but are not displayed.

Melody Notes

The Lyrics track can be linked to the Melody track, using the Links page.

This makes the melody notes visible while editing the lyrics text to help place them in the right locations.  This is shown in the picture at the top.

Editing can be made even easier with the Snap to Notes option, where the arrow and Tab keys automatically move the cursor to the next melody note for each new lyric event.