Readers and writers blog

Our new songbook, Sing along with ease, isn’t guaranteed to get you there, but it will help you practice, practice, practice.

That’s one of the benefits of the songbook that I don’t often think about, but the subject came up while I was visiting a local music store the other day. The store owner said the book would be helpful to kids learning the guitar or piano.

Well, that’s occurred to me before. Because the songbook is laid out in single-note melodies that would be easy to follow for someone learning to pick out songs on a guitar or piano. The chord changes are right there in the appropriate spots over the melody lines. And most of the songs are in the ‘easy’ keys — C and G — that don’t have a lot of sharps and flats in them. (Actually, between the two of them, there’s only one sharp — F-sharp in the key of G.)

Furthermore, the book’s introduction shows where to find both guitar and piano chords — every chord that’s possible to play on either instrument.

For a lot of young people, the songbook with its more than 300 oldtime favorite songs would be a revelation to a different era — actually, several different eras — of music. Some of those young students might learn to like some of those songs.

And frankly, when I think back to my days as a young piano student, I realize that most of the music in Sing along with ease is a lot younger than the Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin that I had to learn and that presumably young students have to learn today.

One final thought on this subject: Learning to play guitar or piano isn’t just for kids. I’m still learning both, and I’m about to turn 70. And that’s where Sing along with ease can be really valuable. A lot of adults have heard a lot of those old songs, and I’ll bet a lot of them would like to play them as well.

Look at the image above. If old Johann Sebastian can take time to practice the guitar — and lefthanded to boot — I guess any of us can.

– Sid Leavitt

Orders for our new songbook, Sing along with ease, are now coming in, and I thought we should explain some of our sales philosophy and procedures.

First, we don’t use any online payment service such as PayPal or Google Checkout. Having grown up in a different era than most of today’s consumers, we feel really uneasy about letting someone we don’t know into our electronic bank accounts. So we use an older method — the honor system.

When you order a songbook, we ship it to you. When you receive it, you mail a personal check or money order back to us. That’s it.

So, you ask, what if someone doesn’t mail back the payment or their check bounces? We look at it this way: Our book is just a big collection of old songs that we’ve sung at nursing homes and senior residences for the past 17 years and that we think would be useful to others who want to do the same.

If we can’t trust somebody who loves old songs and wants to sing them along with old folks or maybe just their own family members …. if we can’t trust them, then just who can we trust?

So that’s how it works: You order it, we ship it, you get it, you pay. A few other details: The sales are conducted by the Hat Band, which is the name of our little family band (we all wear hats), and payments are made to me, Sid Leavitt, for the Hat Band. Our mailing address is 868 Neighborhood Road, Lake Katrine, NY 12449.

Another detail, this one that I regret: We’ve raised our shipping cost from $3.16 to $5.79. The lower figure is the U.S. Postal Service’s book rate, its lowest mailing rate but also its slowest for delivery. We originally intended to ship the books in simple envelopes made of Tyvek, an extra-tough (and inexpensive) Dupont plastic that also is used to wrap houses as a water barrier. But then we realized some of these parcels could be five to seven days in transit, so we reconsidered and chose instead a heavier bubble-wrap envelope that accounts for the extra $2.63 in our shipping cost.

On the other hand, we expanded our original songbook offer by adding a free set of templates for making lyrics sheets for audiences. So we hope that’s some kind of offset.

You know, I ordered one of those TurboSnakes the other day — it’s a twistable wire snake that you use to unclog a drain — and it was only $10 for two different sizes. And better yet, they doubled the offer — four TurboSnakes — and all I had to do was pay separate shipping and handling. Well, the S&H was $6.99, and doubling it made it $13.98, plus the original 10 bucks — my $10 order all added up to $23.98. But if you’ve ever struggled with a clogged sink or stood in six inches of water while taking a shower or bought a couple of jugs of liquid drain cleaner at $6 a pop, the TurboSnake still looks like a pretty good deal. Provided, of course, that it works.

Sing along with ease does work. Even if the real price, including the shipping, is $45.74. Because it’s real sheet music — simple melody lines and chord changes that require only basic vocal and-or guitar or piano skills, all the lyrics, each song in a singable key and each on one page (no flipping required) — and there are 313 songs. Most sheet music costs a couple of bucks for a single song. Our sheet music costs less than 15 cents a song.

That’s the end of my latest, as a musician would say, pitch.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is, of course, Felix the Cat, that wonderfully naive feline whose innocence never seemed to get him into serious trouble. His origins date from the early 1920s, although there’s some dispute over who created him — either Australian film producer Patrick Sullivan or American cartoonist Otto Messmer.

Our little band has experimented for years with ways to provide song sheets for the audiences at our singalongs, and now we’ve come up with an effective and inexpensive method to do just that.

We’re adding it to our songbook offer at no extra cost.

But you do need a copying machine (or access to one). And, oh yes, a pair of scissors and some cellophane tape.

The breakthrough to our method came when we finally realized that copying individual pages of sheet music was not the best way to get our audiences more involved. For one thing, the lyrics on sheet music — even simple sheet music like ours — can be hard to read, especially for older audiences, because the lyrics type has to be small enough to coincide with the melody lines and still fit on one page. For another thing, copying sheet music can get expensive, especially since you don’t get all the sheets back after the program.

But the music really is important only to the volunteer vocalists and-or musicians leading the singalong. Audience members don’t need all the melody staffs, notes and chord changes. They just need the words.

But how best to provide them? Well, we could bank a series of lyrics on one sheet of paper. But then, another problem. What if folks wanted to sing only one song from that page and another on another page and another … you get the idea. You’d end up with scores of pages and audience members shuffling through them. Finally, we figured it out:

The singalong leaders could decide ahead of time what songs to sing, then cut out just those songs, tape them together to make sheets with multiple lyrics, then copy those sheets for the audience.

So we’ve made templates for more than 240 of our songs to which audience members are likely to know the tunes or that they’re likely to want to sing. The templates have the songs basically in the same alphabetical order that they appear in the songbook, and each song is separated by a dotted line to make cutting easier. The templates — and this is important — have to be copied first and then the copies cut up to make the song sheets.

This also is important: The templates are printed in a type that is larger than that on the sheet music, so it’s easier to read.

The type looks something like this.

One set of templates is included free with each songbook we sell.

We’ve managed to get those 240 or so songs onto two dozen sheets of paper. (NOTE: We’ve put the songs on both sides of the templates, so whoever copies them will have to copy one side on one sheet of paper, the other on another, to avoid chopping the back side in the middle of a song when cutting one from the front side. That’s why the templates have to be copied first.)

Once the lyrics sheets are compiled, of course, they can be copied again on both sides of the paper — one sheet on one side, one on the other — to economize again on paper. You can get enough songs for an hour’s program on two pieces of paper — that is, four sides. So for a crowd of, say, 25 people, you need no more than 50 pieces of paper, fewer if folks share the lyrics sheets.

As I said, it’s been our experience that you don’t get all the sheets back from the audience. Some forget to return the sheets (a few forget they even have them), but many like to keep the lyrics. A woman just the other day told us she wanted to sing the songs to herself in the days between our appearances.

Hearing that made up for all the sheets we’d lost.

– Sid Leavitt