This is a curated collection of songs I like to play on acoustic guitar or piano,
with useful performance notes, generally written with a mediocre-at-best male
voice in mind.
I’ve organized some acoustic jams around themes and have packaged sub-songbooks accordingly; more ideas are welcome. Here are the ones we’ve done so far:
Yes, the little arrows next to each song title transpose the song.
Obviously not. However, I can point you to this Spotify playlist:
Spotify Web link
Spotify URI
...that I try to keep up to date.
- The “?” button takes you to a random song (great for icebreaking at jams when no one wants to commit to anything).
- The “home” button takes you back to the table of contents.
- The “play” button starts the screen scrolling, after which you can use the “>>” and “<<” buttons to scroll faster or slower.
- The button that looks like a guitar pops up a "guitar challenge", like "play every chord without the fifth", or "don't use your index finger".
You can also press the space bar to start/stop scrolling, and while scrolling you can use the right and left arrows to scroll faster and slower. Pressing ‘R’ will get you a random song. I’ve found that in the heat of the jam, the keyboard is usually easier to operate than the mouse.
The songs are all in Chordpro
format, with a few extra tags that I’ve added to make it easy to put
together the songbook. In particular, I use the “preferred_key”
tag as an indicator to my parsing stuff that a song should be transposed to a
particular key. I wrote some code (can share on request) to do some
reorganization of the text files, to sanity-check for consistency on things like punctuation and capitaliation, and to generate a songbook file with the
right keys. I then use the awesome program Songsheet generator to
print html and pdf files. Some more C# code uses pdfclown to
post-process the html a bit, generate the mobile and key-specific versions,
and open up the pdf file and re-paginate it so that if you print
double-sided, you won’t have to turn pages in the middle of a song.
Then I take it to Kinko’s and pay $5 to have it spiral-bound. (Sidebar: I recently learned that the fact that I still say “Kinko’s” is one of many ways people know I’m old).
I know. If you have suggestions re: css, printing format, better ways to
tell the html how to paginate, etc., please email me.
I know. I only use the HTML version, and the Kindle version requires a bit of manual intervention to print, so I basically only update the Kindle version when someone emails me.
I started organizing casual jam sessions around themes, usually “songs from this era”, where an “era” is around a decade. At first I was going to start with “songs of the ‘50s”, and not only did I not have enough ‘50s songs, but I also found that a more natural style boundary fell at 1955-1965, putting songs I think of as “pre-rock-era oldies” together. Then the next one logically had to be the decade after that, ending at 1975. But then the ‘80s made more coherent sense, so I went back to mod10==0 boundaries.
