Dan’s Big Awesome Acoustic Songbook

What is this songbook?

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.

Where do I get it?

The html version is the whole songbook in one giant HTML file.

The “split” html version breaks each page into a separate HTML file, useful if the massive HTML file is making your phone sad.

I’m stuck in 2008 and I really want a PDF.

The pdf version is for you.

I’m indecisive and that’s too many songs to pick from.

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:

Can I change keys?

Yes, the little arrows next to each song title transpose the song.

Can you send me all the mp3s?

Obviously not. However, I can point you to this Spotify playlist:

Spotify Web link
Spotify URI

...that I try to keep up to date.

What are the little buttons in the corner of the HTML version?

  • 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.

How did you make it?

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.

If I notice mistakes, should I tell you?

Yes please. Email me.

Why the weird year boundaries for the smaller songbooks?

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.