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.
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 built this tool to build HTML and PDF songbooks from Chordpro files.
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.