{"slug": "solsong-chord-updates", "title": "Solsong Chord Updates", "summary": "Jeff Kaufman updated his digital Secular Solstice Songbook to support chord transposition, fix chord display issues when scrolling, and improve grid alignment. The changes, implemented mostly through Claude Code, allow chords to automatically adjust column widths when accidentals alter character sizes.", "body_md": "A\n[couple\nyears ago](https://www.jefftk.com/p/making-a-secular-solstice-songbook) I put together a\n[Secular Solstice Songbook](https://www.jefftk.com/solsong/),\na compilation of all the songs we've sung at\n[Boston\nSolstice](https://www.jefftk.com/p/boston-solstice-2025-retrospective). Anna Tchetchetkine and I led a session of group singing\nat\n[LessOnline](https://less.online/), following up from an\ninformal one the year before, and I noticed several annoying things\nwith its chord handling:\n\nDespite being digital, it didn't support transposition.\n\nSome songs didn't repeat the chord if they were unchanged, which meant that when scrolling new lyrics into view you'd lose the chords.\n\nThis is minor, but I like to align the chords in a grid and the repeat sign was very slightly to narrow, throwing off the grid.\n\nIn asked Claude Code to fix these, and it did almost all of it. The exception was a few cases where it wasn't obvious which chords to use and I needed to make some manual edits.\n\nMy favorite part is that it preserves the grid even when the addition\nof accidentals changes widths. For example, here are the chords I\nhave for [haMephorash](https://www.jefftk.com/solsong/#hamephorash):\n\n```\nC Am C  Am\nF G  C  G\nC FG Am F\nG E  Am /\n```\n\nIf for some reason I wanted to play it in `E`\n\ninstead of\n`C`\n\n, I could bring it up four semitones:\n\n```\nE C#m E   C#m\nA B   E   B\nE AB  C#m A\nB Ab  C#m /\n```\n\nNote that because `C#m`\n\nis wider the columns containing it\nare now slightly wider to make room, accross the board.\n\nI'm pretty happy with it, though I haven't tried using it for real yet.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solsong-chord-updates", "canonical_source": "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FtFdzhbtmxAekNqBA/solsong-chord-updates", "published_at": "2026-06-10 21:00:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-11 17:51:04.765671+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Claude Code", "Anna Tchetchetkine", "Boston Solstice", "LessOnline", "Jeff Kaufman"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solsong-chord-updates", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solsong-chord-updates.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solsong-chord-updates.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/solsong-chord-updates.jsonld"}}