The words of the songs on this website are multi-coloured. The colours are used to show what chords should be played to accompany the songs.
The colours are easy to remember as they are the colours of the rainbow. Each colour represents a chord built on a note of the scale.
In the key of C the chords are:
I is Red, II is Orange, III is Yellow, IV is Green, V is Blue, VI is Indigo.
So whatever key you play in the tonic is red, the sub-dominant is green, and the dominant seventh is blue .
For a basic 12-bar blues in E you just need Red-Green-Blue. • E • A • B7 •
The words for minor chords are written in italic font; sevenths are shown in bold and major chords use normal font. Orange, yellow, and indigo, (II, III, VI) are usually minor and blue (V) chords are normally 7ths.
The system is flexible enough to cope with exceptions to the above convention, as shown by the following example. Playing in E, the shift from E to E7 is shown by changing the red text from normal to bold font, and the shift from A major to A minor by going to italics. Major 7ths are shown in bold underlined.
| E | E7 | A | Am |
The rainbow style mark-up is economical. You do not need extra lines to show the chords, so you can get more lyric lines on the screen. It matters if you are using a mobile. Eg..
C Em Am F C G7
Wise men say only fools rush in
F G7 Am Dm Em G7 C
but I can't help falling in love with you
Rainbow lyric markup makes it easy to change key without a using a capo. You just need to use a different line in the rainbow key. For example to play the above couplet in G, try:
Or select a key from the menu in the box below:
© JR 2012