Do you make up your own songbooks?

mikelz777

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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)?
 
Yes I do. I'm pretty much from the same school of thought. I got tired of buying books full of songs that I didn't want to play just to get one or two songs that I did want to play. There are just too many sources for songs out there to tap.
 
I arrange all the songs my students sing...with lead sheets...and almost nothing matches an original source note for note or chord for chord. Existing sheets help me, but I almost always feel that some chords should be different.

In the case of the Daily Ukulele, a lot of material needs to be transposed so it can be sung with. Sopranos and tenors generally cannot sing low G's!

On another note, I have started making video play along for all of the Daily 365. As of today, eight down...358 to go. And I am also making play along videos of all kinds of songs to use instructionally in schools...that is a fun process involving creativity, chordal analysis, and finding resources. It has been a blast to work on these things this summer. I am almost recharged enough to go back to the classroom and stand my ground for another 9 months! :)
 
Yes I maintain a song book because my musical tastes vary a lot and published books just never cover it all. I use my tablet with the Guitar Tabs app more than anything now. If I think of a song I can look it up, find the version I like, transpose to a different key if necessary and save it to my favorites. I will some times print off a song if I am spending a lot of time practicing it. There is no substitute for the ability to make notes on paper.
 
I have 1000+ songs on my iPad using onsong. A quick look shows top artists are Beatles, Stones, Eagles, Dylan, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, Hank Sr., Haggard, Prine. I also have my songs broken down into categories and sets for easy access, like 2, 3 chord songs, holiday, bluegrass, etc. This is super helpful for playing in groups. I can send out PDFs that meet the needs of a particular group. Right now I'm making up a 10 song, dead easy, set to share with absolute beginners. I just finished a 50 song set to share with a mixed instrument jam I call the Cowboy Chord Club, 3-4 easy chord songs (no rapid chord changes either) in keys that are easy for most (guitar & uke primary)
I love making my own sheets, especially if I'm gonna share them (especially with beginners). I want to have chords over every verse (otherwise song falls apart), chord diagrams, good flow (so they're not jumping all over the page, good size font and one page if at all possible. I also often make more than one version of a song. One accurate to the original, sometimes one altered to how I want to play it and a third, simplified version to share with beginners.
 
Over the last 5 years, my wife and I have made three full loose leaf binders from chords and lyrics from the internet. Most repeated artists are probably John Denver, Jimmy Buffet, Eagles, and others. I also like to include The Daily Ukulele in our rotation. It challenges us to use chords that our other songbooks don't and, over time, helps us add more color to our old favorites. Never too old to learn and enjoy our uke sessions.
 
I make my own pile-of-papers with a mix of lead sheets, chord/lyrics and tabs on them :)
I have a huge fake book with hundreds of songs in it, and if I am lucky I can find the song I want to learn in it. But most of the time I need to go online to find the particular song I want.

I am very hesitative to buy a songbook with a ton of songs in it, from which I only consider playing a handful. Does anybody know if Hal Leonard has a "pick and print" songbook feature?
It would be nifty if you could just pick a number of songs you wanted, and have a custom songbook printed and bound and shipped to you. But I guess that is wishfull thinking.
 
Mikelz777, you have inspired me. I have piles of paper songs, the Daily Ukulele, songs in Onsong and a gig book of songs I play with a group. Some of the songs I really enjoy, some I play because the group likes them. It's time I start a book of songs that move me into my songbook.
 
I absolutely make my own songbooks. I have a large binder with clear insert pockets on the outside covers. In these I have the two-page chord sheet(s) from Michellle Kiba's Pa Mele O Hokulea Ukulele Academy, downloaded from the internet. Inside are chord/lyric sheets, leadsheets, and full arrangements from a variety of online sources, all in plastic page protectors. Most are from Dr. Uke, Ukester Brown, Ukulele Mike, and a few from Alligator Boogaloo. I particularly like jazz/pop standards from the 20s and 30s, and these sources are great for that stuff. Dr. Uke's listings are very broad and contain some more contemporary stuff as well. Ukester Brown is an exceptional song collector and performer and usually finds the original verses to songs that we know now only as choruses. I have separate books of Ukulele Mike's chord melody arrangements, printed out from the e-books when I undertake new songs. I have Glen Rose's jazz lessons in a separate binder as well. I agree with the poster who said he didn't want to buy an entire songbook to get one song, especially if it's a widely available public domain song. I have a few ukulele songbooks and they're not all useful. I like every song in my own books and am ready to play any one at any time. That's the fun of it.
 
I have 1000+ songs on my iPad using OnSong.

Do you have them in there as PDFs, or as created songs with lyrics and chords? I ask because I thought OnSong could not only project lyrics through a display and a non-notation lead sheet for the iPad users, but also could play a generated accompaniment? That would be incredible if that is true...

I haven't used OnSong for a while...but I do own it. I think Planning Center can also do some of this...but it needs to be managed by your local church music leader.

I use forScore most of the time (I also like unrealBook) and if you count the Daily 365 and Leap Year editions, that is over 700 songs in just two books. It isn't a competition, but I try to scan everything (personal and school) and probably have access to well over 10,000 songs with everything stored in the cloud (I only pull down what I need at the time into forScore). I recently upgradeded my iPad to the newest 12.9" iPad Pro, and I'm loving it (working on that as I write this).
 
I have separate books of Ukulele Mike's chord melody arrangements, printed out from the e-books when I undertake new songs.

It is a little off-topic, but what do you think of them? I'm ready for some more challenges in terms of picking and chord melody, but I want to work with material that isn't just "heady" but is fun to play. Part of the reason I never became that good at piano (I can play parts as a teacher, but would never be an accompanist) is that lessons were filled with playing all kinds of things that just didn't (and still don't at age 44) interest me!
 
Do you have them in there as PDFs, or as created songs with lyrics and chords? I ask because I thought OnSong could not only project lyrics through a display and a non-notation lead sheet for the iPad users, but also could play a generated accompaniment? That would be incredible if that is true...

I haven't used OnSong for a while...but I do own it. I think Planning Center can also do some of this...but it needs to be managed by your local church music leader.

I use forScore most of the time (I also like unrealBook) and if you count the Daily 365 and Leap Year editions, that is over 700 songs in just two books. It isn't a competition, but I try to scan everything (personal and school) and probably have access to well over 10,000 songs with everything stored in the cloud (I only pull down what I need at the time into forScore). I recently upgradeded my iPad to the newest 12.9" iPad Pro, and I'm loving it (working on that as I write this).

I try not to do PDFs except for standard notation or tab/chord melody arrangements. Most are either created/modified by me in and are formatted by onsong so that I can use edit features, display features, instant transposing and the like. PDFs can't do this, they are what they are. You can share songs with others in multiple formats, say if I'm gonna email a set to someone and they don't have onsong, I'll just send it out as a PDF or whatever format works for them. You can share songs wirelessly to band mates. You can project to tv (I've never used this but it's a cool feature). I also see there is a spot to attach an MP3 to a particular song, but I haven't explored that either. Lots of tutorials online (and in the app) that show you how these features work.
 
This is an example of what my song sheets look like. They are all in the same font and notated in the same format so the book as a whole looks uniform. The size of font may change, wordy songs being smaller and shorter songs larger but the range only varies from 12-16 pts. Whenever I can, I try to get the song and the chord diagrams on one page but on a few songs it's impossible. As you can see in the example, this is a new song I just worked up so the dots aren't yet drawn on the chord diagrams.

IMG_2349.jpg
 
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Mikelz777, you have inspired me. I have piles of paper songs, the Daily Ukulele, songs in Onsong and a gig book of songs I play with a group. Some of the songs I really enjoy, some I play because the group likes them. It's time I start a book of songs that move me into my songbook.

My system has worked pretty well for me. Over the years there are probably less than half a dozen songs that made my book that I would subsequently choose to remove.
 
I started our local Ukulele Group back in 2010 and we
built up a songbook I had made up, that ran to around
one hundred and eighty songs.
I had to pass that group on to my second in command,
for health reasons; but soon after I started a smaller
group who play B/U's, and our songbook, again made by
me, is now at two hundred and four songs (and growing!)
I find a basic arrangement of the song we want, and then
play around with the arrangement and key, until I end up
with a sheet that works well enough for the group.
I love it, and if I did not have the group(s) I would have
made the songbooks up anyway, for my own use!
 
This is an example of what my song sheets look like. They are all in the same font and notated in the same format so the book as a whole looks uniform. The size of font may change, wordy songs being smaller and shorter songs larger but the range only varies from 12-16 pts. Whenever I can, I try to get the song and the chord diagrams on one page but on a few songs it's impossible. As you can see in the example, this is a new song I just worked up so the dots aren't yet drawn on the chord diagrams.

View attachment 101939

I was going to attempt some humor and say that some of my middle school students play like those chord diagrams...everything is a C6 no matter the actual chord!

This is where I would again encourage the investigation of Chordette...you could easily drop the chords right into the booth, of that document.
 
Yes, we used to. We have a Beatles song book, Train songs book, Christmas songs book, Cowboy song book, Irish song book, so far. But like bunny, we have begun to put them on 2nd hand iPads using OnSong. We grew weary of carrying around heavy books, and killing trees.
 
Is anyone else using the Ukegeeks song editor? http://ukegeeks.com/songeditor

I like it when I have a song that I need to transpose but I haven't settled on a key yet, and there are too many chords for me to transpose in my head (Embraceable You most recently; still not sure if I prefer it in C or D)

I've been looking for a good ChordPro editor that runs on Windows. Any suggestions?

The easy songs I format in MS Word and save as individual PDF files that are managed in MobileSheets on my tablet. Or I capture them in the GuitarTAPP app. Writing up song booklets for the local uke club is fun. The club prints paper copies, but I keep them as PDF files. Here's a packet of Leon Redbone songs that I shared here before.

And yet I still have a huge 3-ring binder collecting loose scraps of paper.

I was researching early arrangements of Greensleeves and found out there's a collection of lute music from the early 1600's in a museum (can't remember which offhand). The manuscripts came from an English gentleman's estate. They were unbound and printed or handwritten on various types of paper over the span of many years. In other words, that guy was collecting tab like the rest of us!

ETA: I should add that I'm mostly formatting chord/lyric sheets, not lead sheets. For lead sheets or tab I use Tabledit or Finale.
 
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How much more is killed, burned and toxically landfilled to make iPads!

That thought occurred to me. It's not about saving trees as most paper is made from trees grown sustainably, though there is an energy cost. However the advantage of a tablet is that it is much less bulky than folders. It is important to make sure it has sufficient charge before you go out.
 
I don't want to get into another argument here on UU, but someone has to point out that iPads and iPhones are highly recyclable, by design, and the company has a goal to build all devices with 100% recycled materials (or close to it) within 10 years. They are also running on clean energy in their stores (they may have already reached 100% at that), have invented robots to disassemble existing devices into component parts, and have been addressing human rights issues across the product line--from the mining of the raw materials to the final sales in the store.

No--they aren't perfect--but they are one of the most forward thinking companies, and they do put their money where their mouth is. Even in terms of commitment to the community. A local ukulele player works at Apple, and Apple makes a financial contribution to some organizations based on the time that he spends leading groups and events on his personal time.

I'm an iPad person (hard to think that 12 years ago, I was an anti-Apple person) so you can disregard my opinion. That said, as a musician and as a music teacher, I love the benefits of performing and teaching with my iPad...even more so with my new iPad Pro. I'm not going to try to do a cost analysis, although a carbon footprint study would be interesting--but the tools that I have available at all times are things I wouldn't have with paper--and I wouldn't want to go back.

And if you don't want to use a device--that's okay, too. I'm not going to think poorly of you!
 
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