Readers and writers blog

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