Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click 
Sheet music made easier
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.
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