Readers and writers blog

Yes, our songbook is ballooning, and a lot of volunteer singalong leaders are rising with it. Here’s how that happens:

When we in the Hat Band add a song to the book, Sing along with ease, we send free copies of the sheet music to everyone who’s already bought the book. That way, everyone’s repertoire grows.

When we began marketing copies of our book last January, it contained 313 songs. It’s now up to 331, all old favorites that are ideal for singalongs. Most of those additions have come from audience requests, some of them from our farflung group of songbook customers.

The process is simple: When we find a song we like, we convert it to simple sheet music in a singable key through a computer program called Finale PrintMusic. That gives us an electronic version of the song that we can print out for our own songbook and that we can email to everyone else who has the songbook. They print out the song and they’ve got it, too.

Now, I can’t say we’ve sold hundreds of the books in our first year, but it’s been in the dozens. And they’ve gone to a wide market — from New York to California, from Canada to Australia.

We’re not dealing with a mass market here. Singalong volunteers are, sadly, a rare breed. (Although I know of at least one case where a customer wanted a songbook just to help him improve his piano skills. Sing along with ease, with its single-note melody lines and simple chord notations, is ideal for someone who wants to dust off a guitar or return to a long-neglected piano for a little solo music at home.)

Basically, we’re in a small niche. Or, to add yet another metaphor, on the big ocean of the Internet, we’re in a little rowboat. But we stay in touch with others who’ve joined us bobbing around on the waves. And as we find additional songs, we mass-email them to everyone else, helping to raise the tide that, as they say, lifts all boats.

Or, to return to our original imagery, the balloon gets larger and more buoyant. And as long as the Hat Band keeps adding these wonderful old songs, the sky’s the limit. We all go up. We hope.

– Sid Leavitt

It’s a form of inflation, but one we’re glad to live with: Our songbook, Sing along with ease, keeps getting larger.

It’s a slow process, but steady. Since we started promoting the book in January, its contents have increased from 313 oldtime favorite songs to a current total of 318. Now that’s not very fast, but two years ago, before we started committing the songs to computerized sheet music, the total was around 250.

When I began doing weekly singalongs at our county infirmary more than 17 years ago, I started with only six songs. They were given to me on mimeograph paper by the activities director who had accepted my offer to play backup guitar while she led the singalong. Well, she didn’t show up for the second week, so I was on my own from then on — and desperate for sheet music, which is the only way I can play. So I started scraping together songs from any place I could find them, copying them onto staff paper by hand, and the rest is, as they say, a burgeoning songbook.

A great help in this process has been my father- and mother-in-law, Glenn and Virginia Sunderman, who joined me shortly after my first singalongs, and then their daughter, Bonnie, my wife. We play as the Hat Band (we all wear hats) and do three singalongs a week at area nursing homes and senior residences.

There is a downside to our songbook’s slow but steady growth — our shipping costs also are growing slowly but steadily. In January, the songbook weighed just under three pounds, and the cheapest postal rate — the media or book rate — for that weight was our original shipping cost, $3.16. Then we found it necessary to add bubble-wrap packaging, and that pushed the cost to $5.40. Then we added some ‘new’ songs, and now we’re over three pounds and at a shipping cost of $5.79 per book.

The three-ring binder we use has the capacity for another 240 songs, but I doubt we’ll reach that number any time soon, so the shipping costs for our future customers should creep up only slowly. And our growth, by the way, will be shared by our past customers at no cost because they’ll get the additional songs for free.

One of the neat things about our Internet age (and there are many things that are not so neat) is that we’re electronically connected to our customers. And so, as we add songs to the book, we can send out electronic copies to those who already have bought the book. Although it’s a free service, it’s really nothing to brag about — we simply send a mass email with the added sheet music as pdf attachments to all our songbook customers for them to print out for themselves.

It’s nice to know we’re all using the same songbook, no matter where we live on this planet.

A note about what songs we add: We always get suggestions for additional songs, but only infrequently do we add them. They have to be the right era — oldtime — and songs that a lot of people know. Musical quality isn’t always the criterion.

For example, we just added ‘On Top of Old Smokey,’ not a musically challenging song but one that our audiences know and sing along with (which is the whole idea, right?). And then there’s ‘Darling Nelly Gray’ …. well, yes, that is a case of musical quality …. one of the most beautiful, saddest songs ever written.

And there’s ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ a song to which I knew only the chorus, and frankly, it bored me. But then we started getting customers from Australia and I couldn’t imagine a songbook without the unofficial Australian anthem, so I looked up the whole song and found it much better than my preconception.

It’s about an itinerant traveler who stops somewhere in the outback to brew some tea and spots a wandering sheep. The man is hungry, but the sheep’s owner and his posse aren’t far away, so …. Well, you’re just going to have to buy the book.

– Sid Leavitt

Since we started selling our singalong songbook a few months ago, we’ve gotten orders from various parts of the United States and Canada, but it wasn’t until we sent one to Australia that it really struck me:

This little songbook …. well, not really little, since it has sheet music for more than 300 oldtime favorites …. this collection of songs that we’ve compiled and sung for the past 18 years has traveled out of town, out of state, out of the country and now out of the Northern Hemisphere.

The songs that our little family band shares three times a week with folks in our small town are now being shared with folks in farflung parts of the wide world.

That same thought struck my wife, Bonnie, at about the same time:

‘I like to think about people in all these places singing the same songs we do,’ she said. ‘It’s spreading the cause.’

And what cause is that? Well, it’s not money, although we hope to make enough to keep printing and shipping out the songbooks. No, it’s to help people who would like to volunteer to lead singalongs at local nursing homes and senior residences, as we in the Hat Band do. And to sing along with their friends and family, as we also do. And to share these songs with younger people.

We’re not trying to compete with rap music or hard rock. But we are trying to keep alive those songs that have been favorites over the past century and a half. They’re part of our shared heritage, or, better said, a heritage that should be shared. Because if it isn’t, it dies.

When I was a kid, the country was coming out of the Great Depression and nobody my family knew had any money. So folks would get together at somebody’s house with a few bottles of beer — and sing. In the 1934 movie ‘It Happened One Night,’ Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable are on an old clunker of a bus one stormy night when all the passengers decide to entertain themselves by singing. They all break into ‘The Man on the Flying Trapeze’ (three verses and the chorus of which, by the way, are in our book, Sing along with ease).

Try that today and you’d probably be arrested by the bus driver or, in the earlier example, thrown out of the house.

Our new friend in Australia is a 70-year-old gent who sings and plays guitar in, as he put it, ‘rest homes and community age care situations.’ When he saw the songbook ad on our website, he didn’t realize we were in New York state. The book weighs about three pounds, and shipping it to Australia cost him an extra $15.29 over our regular U.S. shipping charge of $5.79. He was willing to pay the surcharge. Although he didn’t say it, frankly, I don’t think you can find another songbook like this on the Internet.

You know, one of the songs that isn’t in the songbook is ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ I think we’re going to have to add it one of these days. And when we do, we’ll send an electronic copy to everyone who’s already bought the songbook so they can add it to their collection.

Ah, cyber-technology. A newfangled way to save oldtime favorites.

– Sid Leavitt

Our singalong songbook is no longer just a musical experience for us in the Hat Band. Now that we’re marketing the book to others, it’s also an electronic experience that keeps showing us ways to improve it.

So we’re adding two new services to the book, Sing along with ease, that came out of requests from customers. And both add-ons are free:

1. Additional sheet music for songs that we add to the book in the future.

2. Electronic access to our lyrics templates.

The first add-on occurred to us when a customer suggested two songs that are not in the songbook’s repertoire. Now, the songbook is the same one we in the Hat Band (we all wear hats) use when we do singalongs at local nursing homes and senior residences. We get suggestions all the time about additional songs, but we add them only when they feel right to us. (The current list of oldtime favorites rose to 314 songs when we added ‘Umbrella Man,’ which, like many of the songs in the book, was suggested by an audience member.) Again, we add songs to our repertoire only occasionally, but when we do, we’ll add them as well to the songbook we market. And we’ll send them to anyone who already owns the songbook, as we did with ‘Umbrella Man.’

Now for the second add-on: Each songbook includes templates for lyrics sheets that are intended to be copied on a copying machine, then the copies cut up and reassembled into program sheets that can be copied and handed out to an audience (an ideal way to increase audience interest and participation). But for those who are a little more adventurous on their computers, we’ll provide, upon request, an electronic copy of the templates that can be reformatted, for example, to make the type larger than it already is (currently 14-point). Actually, those customers with moderate cyber-skills can reassemble their own lyrics sheets on their own computer and print them out without need of a copying machine.

Just in case you think we’re offering a lot with these add-ons …. well, we are, but it’s neither difficult nor expensive for us to do it. We make up the sheet music on a home computer, and we have an email list of all our customers, so it’s just a matter of sending out one mass email to all of them with one attachment for the new sheet music. And it’s just as easy to send out an electronic lyrics template to anyone who requests it.

In the end, we’re not trying to make a lot of money. (I’m about to turn 70, two of the other three band members are in their 80s, we’ve all lived frugal lives, and we intend to keep on doing so.) No, the songbook came out of a desire to get more people singing those songs that, like the rest of us, have weathered the years. We think it’s worth doing, and we think others do, too.

Besides, once you’ve paid for the instruments (or the songbook), it’s all free entertainment from then on.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The little guy with the magnifying glass in the image at top was found at Global Search Network, a website maintained by an executive management recruiting group.

Well, not really — we don’t have any planes — but here’s the point:

Unlike many manufacturers, we regularly use our own product — a sheet music songbook of more than 300 old favorites that we take three times a week to singalongs at local nursing homes and senior residences. And we continue to improve it.

Because like our customers, we’re also new users of the songbook. The songs are the same ones that our little family band (we call ourselves the Hat Band because we all wear hats) has sung for the past two decades, but the book itself is new to us, too.

Our old songbook was a stiff-sided heavy binder that was stuffed haphazardly with hand-punched sheet music, much of it handwritten, and that always threatened to fall off the music stand. Our new songbook, Sing along with ease, is a collection of professional sheet music, done on a computer and arranged alphabetically, that sits in a sleek binder of soft-sided, durable vinyl.

It’s a great improvement, but that slick new binder has one annoying characteristic — the soft vinyl has an electrostatic attraction to the first and last pages in the book, trapping them in the binder rings when the book is closed and eventually causing those pages to tear. So we came up with a simple fix:

The songbook now has front and back fly leaves of cardboard-like paper that is heavy enough to ignore the soft vinyl’s electrostatic attraction. The book now opens and closes just as slick as it looks, with all the pages under control.

The fly leaves are green, reflecting their recycled content, and we’ve mailed a set to all the customers who’ve bought the book so far.

So get your new and even more improved Sing along with ease songbook today, and get out there and start singing along (or stay inside with the family — or just by yourself — and do the same thing).

We may be a tiny company that can’t fly its own planes, but we’ve fly-leafed our own songbooks.

– Sid Leavitt

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

Our new songbook, Sing along with ease, is drawing endorsements from around the world:

• Barack Obama: That health care thing isn’t going so well, but my musical life is at an all-time high, thanks to Sing along with ease. We now have a couple of singalongs a week at the White House.

• George W. Bush: Frankly, I used to think of singalongs as a commie plot, but Sing along with ease has changed my perspectioness. Gives me something to do in retiredom. I just wish Cheney would stop singing flat.

• Pope Benedict XVI: Hey, I really like two of those 313 oldtime favorite songs in Sing along with ease — ‘Santa Lucia’ and ‘O Sole Mio.’ [EDITOR’S NOTE: Those songs really are in the book.]

• Motorhead: Enough of this heavy metal trash. Sing along with ease has drawn us back to the old favorites — and is now our official songbook.

• Black Sabbath: Yeah, what they said.

• The Rev. Pat Robertson: Sing along with ease is clearly the result of a deal with the devil, but it does include more than two dozen religious songs and Christmas carols. What the heck . . . thumbs up!

• The Devil: Yeah, what he said.

Seriously, friends, this songbook is the real deal. It’s the same one that our little family band — me, my wife and her parents — have been using and compiling for the past 17 years playing at various nursing homes and senior residences in our area. We still play three times a week.

It’s a good deal, and it’s the simplified sheet music that makes it so. Our sheet music shows a single-line melody that a basic guitarist or pianist can play along with the chords over the melody and the lyrics beneath or that an unaccompanied vocalist can follow easily. Sheet music — that is, music showing the actual tune — can be expensive. We found a typical two-sheet song on the Internet for $4.95 or about $2.50 per sheet. Dividing the price of our book, $39.95, by the number of songs in it, 313, gives a per-sheet cost of less than 13 cents. Our songs are easier to follow, and each is on one sheet, so there’s no flipping pages.

And it’s an idealistic deal.

Sure, we get some money out of it — enough to cover our materials, equipment and production costs — but this is more altruism than capitalism. Singing old songs with senior citizens — songs that were new when they were — can be, like the credit card ad says, priceless.

This book could be just the vehicle to do that. Not just for volunteers but for staff members at nursing homes or senior residences who would like to add a singalong to their activities schedule.

And it’s not just for seniors. There have been times in my younger life when I felt so crappy that I just wanted to be alone. I would sit at a piano and pick away at a sad tune. If I’d had this songbook — yes, there are some sad songs in there — it might have gone a little easier.

Or think about sitting down with your family and singing some of these songs. Maybe that piano you neglect or that guitar sitting in a dusty corner or that voice you raise just for arguing …. maybe they have a better use.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top was found on travel writer Andrew Petcher’s website Have Bag, Will Travel.

The purpose of our new singalong songbook, Sing along with ease, is to make music, well, easier. And a lot cheaper.

A comparison is in order:

At right are two samples of the song ‘Amazing Grace.’ The top one, subtitled ‘Them,’ really is a sample — the first five bars is all they show you on the Internet because they want you to buy the whole thing. The bottom one, ‘Us,’ is the entire song from our book, complete with four verses.

• To begin with, their song is written for the piano in the key of G, which brings the range on a guitar to an uncomfortably low level for most singers (please see note below). Our song is in the key of C, all of it in a comfortable singing range.

• Their song, because it is written for piano, shows all the chord notes a pianist would play. That requires two staffs — the upper or treble clef and the lower or bass clef — and makes the music more complicated than singers need. Singers require only the top note in the upper staff, which is the simple melody line that our song shows. And our song, rather than show all the chord notes, simply shows the chord notation above the melody. Even a basic guitarist knows those chords by their notation — C, C7, F, Am, G, G7 — or, if not, we explain on the first page of the songbook where to find them. Same for pianists.

• Because their song requires two staffs to show all the chord notes, it also spills over onto two pages — and that’s for ‘Amazing Grace,’ which, as you can see, is not a long song. Truly long songs would require three, four or more pages of sheet music. Our song is complete on one page — as are each of the 313 songs in the book.

• Finally, for their sheet music, they want $4.95. Our song — less than 13 cents.

After 17 years of doing it ourselves, we want to make singing along as easy and inexpensive as possible for those people who just might want to volunteer to lead singalongs in nursing homes or senior residences — perfect audiences for the oldtime favorite songs that our book offers — or for those people who might want to do a little family singing at home. What a perfect way for the over-50s to introduce some of these classics to the under-50s.

Call any of it a cultural exchange.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

A guitar plays sheet music an octave lower than does a piano. A guitar has a narrower range than a piano, and bringing the pitch down an octave brings all the singable notes from the bass and treble clefs into a guitar’s range on a single upper staff.