Repeats, endings and section brackets

A repeat sign is a pair of brackets. Play the bars between them, go back to the opening bracket, and play them again. With nothing else written, that is twice through. When it is more than twice, a count sits beside the closing bracket: 3x means three times in total, not three times back. Brackets alone already mean twice, so the app prints a count only when it is more.

Two things follow from the brackets being separate marks:

• A closing bracket with no opening one means go back to the top of the chart.
• A repeat can open in one section and close in another. An opening bracket at the start of the verse and a closing one at the end of the chorus is ordinary.

Most repeated passages do not repeat exactly. The first time through, the verse turns around on the 5 to go back; the second time it lands on the 1 and carries on into the chorus. Writing the whole verse twice to change one bar is what endings exist to avoid.

The bars that differ sit outside the repeated body, each under a circled number that says which pass it belongs to. Read it in this order:

• Play the common bars.
• Take the first ending, then go back to the opening bracket. The closing bracket sits at the end of that ending, and it is the point you go back from.
• Play the common bars again, skip the first ending, take the second, and carry on.

A repeat around two bars and one around a whole verse are the same instruction, drawn differently because they are read differently. A small pair of brackets says these bars again. A big pair, taller than the numbers and heavier, says this block again. The eye reads it as structure before it reads a single chord.

Weight and scope are the only difference. The count works the same way and endings work the same way. The app stores the choice as a scope, meaning this repeat wraps a section, and the size of the bracket follows when the chart is drawn.

In the editor, [ and ] place an ordinary pair; { and } place the big one.

The smallest repeat is one bar. A simile mark, a slash with a dot either side, means play the bar before this one again. It saves writing the same number four times in a row, and saves retyping a split bar with its beat marks when the next bar is identical.

One bar at a time, deliberately. Printed music has marks for two and four bars again; the app does not draw them, because a mark that stands for more than one bar makes every bar count on the page uncertain. For two or four bars, write them out or use brackets. In the editor the % key writes the mark, because that is what it looks like.

Printed music has a second vocabulary for going back: the segno, D.S., the coda and Fine. The app can write all of them, and checks that every jump points at a mark that exists. But Nashville charts use them sparingly. The common practice is to route the song straight down the page — brackets, endings, a section label, a note in prose where the road needs one — and to keep D.S. al Coda for the arrangement that genuinely cannot be written any other way.

If you find yourself reaching for a segno, ask first whether a second pair of brackets would do.