blog » May 21, 2005/Guitar chord cheat sheet

Well, I finally got around to cloning my guitar chord sheet (17kB, PDF) (or lower quality PNG format (83kB) if you don’t want to wait for Acrobat Reader to load). If you don’t understand it, don’t worry. Most people don’t. Maybe I’ll eventually put together a page that explains how it works.

I’ve had that sheet (or a sheet like it) in my guitar binder for a long time. The first sheet that I had made, I did by hand on a sheet of graph paper. I then remade the sheet in StarOffice, so that I could print it off again whenever I needed to. Unfortunately, I lost that file, so the sheet that I had was one of a kind. I even made a sheet protector, cleverly disguised as a “Hubert’s guitar binder” cover sheet, to make sure that my cheat sheet didn’t get ripped. Some people asked for a copy of my sheet, but not being able to print out another copy, they had to photocopy it, which wasn’t ideal.

Given the repetitiveness of patterns in the sheet, it makes more sense to generate it programmatically rather than using a normal drawing program. But I wasn’t sure what language to use, since I’m not a graphics guy. I had even considered learning PostScript to generate it, but I never got around to it, being busy with my other programming projects and school stuff. Then I came across Asymptote, which is co-written by John Bowman, who taught me MATH 217/317, and whose office was right across the hall from mine when I worked at PINTS. Asymptote is a vector graphics language inspired by MetaPost designed for high-quality typesetting for technical drawings. Since Asymptote has a C++-like syntax, it was easy enough to learn, and I managed to knock off the chord sheet in an evening. And I must say, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.