mikelz777
Well-known member
I was wondering how many people here make up their own songbooks.
When I first started playing the ukulele, The Daily Ukulele was my go-to source for playing music. After a while, I grew pretty bored with it and realized that the vast majority of the songs in there were songs that I had little to no interest in playing. Thus came the impetus for making my own song book. Currently I play all my music from song sheets. I've never sat down and memorized a song so my song book is very important to me.
My current process is to find the chords for a song that I like and then I bookmark them. I probably have several dozen songs bookmarked. Then over the course of weeks/months I'll play through my bookmarks and in that time decide what songs I continue to like enough to want to make up a chord sheet for my songbook. (Of course there have been songs I liked immediately and made up a song sheet on the spot.) When a song makes the cut for my book I'll take the lyrics and bury the chord names right in the lyrics where the chord changes occur. I also put chord diagrams on the bottom of each page so anyone can look at it and know all the chords in the song. I just paged through my songbook and found that I have at least 82 different artists' music represented. The current leaders of the pack are:
Bob Dylan - 11 songs (but I already know that there will be many more)
John Prine - 9 songs
Hank Williams - 7 songs
Leon Redbone - 6 songs (These are likely covers or public domain but I attribute them to Leon since I got them all from his CDs.)
The Beatles - 5 songs (I was surprised I only have 5. I'm sure that number will increase.)
Bruce Springsteen - 5 songs (There's likely to be more in the future.)
There are other repeaters but I only listed those with 5 or more songs.
Do you make up your own songbook(s)? What artists are most represented in your book(s)?
When I first started playing the ukulele, The Daily Ukulele was my go-to source for playing music. After a while, I grew pretty bored with it and realized that the vast majority of the songs in there were songs that I had little to no interest in playing. Thus came the impetus for making my own song book. Currently I play all my music from song sheets. I've never sat down and memorized a song so my song book is very important to me.
My current process is to find the chords for a song that I like and then I bookmark them. I probably have several dozen songs bookmarked. Then over the course of weeks/months I'll play through my bookmarks and in that time decide what songs I continue to like enough to want to make up a chord sheet for my songbook. (Of course there have been songs I liked immediately and made up a song sheet on the spot.) When a song makes the cut for my book I'll take the lyrics and bury the chord names right in the lyrics where the chord changes occur. I also put chord diagrams on the bottom of each page so anyone can look at it and know all the chords in the song. I just paged through my songbook and found that I have at least 82 different artists' music represented. The current leaders of the pack are:
Bob Dylan - 11 songs (but I already know that there will be many more)
John Prine - 9 songs
Hank Williams - 7 songs
Leon Redbone - 6 songs (These are likely covers or public domain but I attribute them to Leon since I got them all from his CDs.)
The Beatles - 5 songs (I was surprised I only have 5. I'm sure that number will increase.)
Bruce Springsteen - 5 songs (There's likely to be more in the future.)
There are other repeaters but I only listed those with 5 or more songs.
Do you make up your own songbook(s)? What artists are most represented in your book(s)?