Readers and writers blog

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 The Hat Band in care of me, Sid Leavitt. 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 $5.40. 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 $2.34 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 $45.35. 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.

Our little family band has been using a slick new version of the songbook we use for singalongs we lead three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

The songbook, entitled Sing along with ease, is now in production, and we are, to put it bluntly, plugging the hell out of it. In fact, I’m thinking of changing the name of this weblog to reflect that it has become, while still a library of written works, basically a promotion for this songbook.

Because I think the book is a great idea — specifically, a great help to volunteers or staff members who would like to have singalongs at their nursing homes or senior residences but don’t feel equipped to do it. This book would take them a long way to doing it.

Our band — we call it the Hat Band because we all wear hats — are not professional singers or musicians, but then again, neither are our audience members. We’re all the same — all folks along in years who enjoy sharing those good oldtime songs.

The photo at top shows our songbook in action at a singalong just yesterday. Well, the book is sort of upper-left-center on the music stand in front of the glamorous lady in the blue sweater and wide-brimmed hat — my mother-in-law, Virginia Sunderman, looking across at the very relaxed banjo player, Glenn Sunderman, her husband and my father-in-law. My wife, Bonnie, their daughter, plays with us on weekends. I am represented in the photo by my guitar sitting upright in my chair while I am taking the picture.

The songbook is a great help to amateurs like us who enjoy getting together and singing along. It shows lyrics, simple one-note melody lines and chord progressions that can be played — or learned — by the most basic guitarists or pianists.

And there are more than 300 oldtime favorites, all songs we’ve collected over the years. Here’s a sample of the titles:

America the Beautiful, Ain’t We Got Fun, April Showers, Auld Lang Syne, The Band Played On, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Carolina in the Morning, Danny Boy, Frankie and Johnny, Freight Train, Hava Nagila, Home on the Range, In the Garden, I Love You Truly, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, Jingle Bells, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, Memories, Missouri Waltz, My Melancholy Baby, Paper Doll, Pretty Baby, Red River Valley, Santa Lucia, Silent Night, Silver Threads, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, The Yellow Rose of Texas.

And that’s just a tenth of the listings.

We produce the songbooks, and we’ll be glad to answer questions about them. They’re $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the United States. That’s less than 13 cents a song — World War I prices for sheet music. So far, the best sheet-music songbook I’ve found on the Internet offers only 53 titles and sells for $79.95.

Even if you don’t want to run around your town annoying senior citizens with your music, it’s a great songbook for family gatherings or just playing by yourself on the old upright piano or that old guitar you haven’t touched since the 1960s.

– Sid Leavitt

Yes, I’ve been away — exactly a year, I see by the date of our last entry — but now I’m back. And here’s what I’ve been doing:

Singalong songbooks. I’m now producing and selling them. Cheap.

What’s that, you say? Who needs a singalong songbook? Well, about 17 years ago, I could have used one.

That’s when I showed up for my second session as a backup guitarist for a singalong at a local nursing home and found I was on my own. I guess the activities director who had led the first session a week earlier figured I should do it myself, being a volunteer and all. She was right, of course, but I had only six song sheets left over from that first session, and I sang and played those six songs for a solid hour.

Well, it’s now 17 years later and my repertoire has grown — by about 300 songs I’ve collected over those years. I should say we’ve collected, because for most of those years, I’ve been part of a family band that includes my wife, Bonnie, and her parents, Glenn and Virginia. We still play three times a week at local nursing homes and senior residences.

Our singalong book now contains 313 songs. It’s a collection of oldtime favorites that most everyone over 50 knows — and most everyone under 50 ought to know. Over the past year, I’ve committed those songs to a computer program called PrintMusic that prints them out, one to a page, in simple musical notation that any music enthusiast — from the most basic singer or instrumentalist to the most accomplished vocalist or accompanist — can follow.

Believe it or not, a good singalong book is hard to find. First, you need all the good old songs that have survived the years. Second, you need the words and music — and by music, I don’t mean simply guitar or piano chords over the words, which is what most singalong books offer. No, you need the melody lines as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve known the first few bars or the refrain of a song but didn’t have a clue about the rest of it. However, the problem with most sheet music showing melodies is that it’s too complicated.

Our songbook is simple — single-note melody lines with chords shown above and lyrics below, all in ‘easy’ keys — mostly C and G — that we’ve found most guitarists and pianists can play and, more important, most people can sing comfortably. That’s why we’ve titled the book Sing along with ease.

The book is bound in a three-hole loose-leaf binder. So you can take pages out or put new ones in, make fresh copies of sheets that have been torn or make copies for audiences.

We’re selling our book for $39.95 plus $3.16 for shipping anywhere in the continental U.S. Searching the Internet, the only comparable sheet-music songbook I’ve found — that is, a book of old songs showing melodies as well as words and chords — offers only 53 songs and sells for $79.95. Our book contains 260 more songs and sells for 40 bucks less.

This book is perfect for volunteers or staff members who lead singalongs at nursing homes or senior residences. It’s also great for family or community get-togethers.

You don’t have to be an accomplished musician to accompany these songs. For hobby guitarists, the chords are simple. For hobby pianists, just play the chords on the left hand, the single-note melodies on the right. In fact, the book tells you where to find basic guitar and piano chords.

So tell your friends. For the price of a couple DVDs, they can sing along with the old standards, more than 300 of them. And do it with ease.

– Sid Leavitt

Thank you, Jerry Waxler, for your comment. I have posted it in the comments section for this entry, not for our previous entry, ‘Riddled by spam,’ which was where you sent it.

I have brought it forward because after reading hundreds of spam comments since our last post Dec. 7 — actually, about 7,500 spam comments, most of them unintelligible — I was delighted to receive yours and wanted to bring attention to it since it raises several issues worth discussing.

Thank you for your recommendation about a spam trapper, but I must confess that as I get better at scanning these conglomerations of self-promoting links and nutty messages, I’m getting somewhat fond of reading spam.

As a reporter, I always enjoyed the weirder side of society, and believe me, there’s nothing stranger than some of this electronic stuff.

Anyway, you have no doubt noticed that I did not file an entry for Dec. 14, 21, 28 or Jan. 4, despite our intention stated in the lefthand column here that we would try to post a new blog entry each Sunday.

The reason I haven’t filed since Dec. 7 is that, like some writers I know, I’m in one of those periods where I haven’t had anything to communicate. This wasn’t a problem in the years I wrote for newspapers as a reporter and editor because I was always responding as a reporter to some news or feature story or as an editor to some reporter’s story. But I did go into those periods of noncommunication when I wrote a book — Adrift in America, which is reprinted in our nonfiction section.

I started writing the book in late 1985 after I met a guy named Steve Lutes in Colorado during a cross-country trip, one of many I’d make in the next five years. During those years, I was living in a truck — actually, a micro-motor home with the barest of necessities — that allowed me to follow a minimalist lifestyle in which I could spend hours, days, sometimes weeks by myself in some remote part of this country, sometimes just thinking, sometimes just looking at the sky. At other times, I would write, sometimes furiously. And then I’d go back to thinking and skywatching. I finished the book in late 1992.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I don’t mind being by myself, cut off from the world, doing nothing, saying nothing. And I guess I’m still more or less in the dawdling mode.

But you, Jerry — I’m glad you’re not the same.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

The image above is the cover art for Incommunicado, a book by Margot Heller and Tom McCarthy, published by Hayward Publishing, available through the Cornerhouse website.

Jerry Waxler is author of the weblog Memory Writers Network, a site that discusses memoirs and how to write them.

I’ve been playing a lot more music these days and not paying as much attention to this website as I probably should. Spammers, on the other hand, have been increasingly attentive to R&W Blog.

We’re getting buried by spam postings in our comments section — hundreds of them a day.

We have a good library of offerings in our Works section — nonfiction, fiction and poetry — and we plan to leave this website up on the Internet for anyone who’d like to read them. Of course, for a website to remain healthy, it must stay active.

During my recent weeks of relative inactivity, R&W Blog’s general health has been slipping — from a Technorati authority of 27 and rank of 305,000th in March to an authority of 9 and rank of 632,000th this month.

That’s still not horrible. Considering that Technorati tracks more than 5 million blogs, a rank of 632,000 still puts us in the top 13 percent.

I’d like to think R&W Blog still has some shine as it sits in this vast cybersphere, much of it wasteland. But like anything that glitters in the desert, not really abandoned but not often visited, it invites vandals.

We’re like a shiny tin can that attracts bullet holes.

Well, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with these spam comments by the hundreds. I do have to scroll through them — I wouldn’t want to miss a legitimate comment from a reader. But I have quickly learned that any comment containing multiple links — they show up on my machine in blue — is spam.

And some of these spam comments are so strange, they’re almost amusing. For example, bad translation into English gives us this offering from newsesystem.com:

Hello! Our company plans creation of essentially new search system! We spend interrogations 3 months. It is important to us to know what search system from existing now on the Internet most to you it is pleasant — google or msn or yahoo. And also that it is pleasant to you and that is not pleasant in these search systems.

(Notice how the words ‘that it’ and ‘that’ in the last sentence are a mistranslation of the word ‘what’?)

Another spammer offers a free loophole to get a gold membership at Adult Friend Finder, a site for “sex without commitment.” I wonder what the silver membership promises — sex with less commitment?

And really, spammers, if you’re going to claim to represent a legitimate business, try spelling it right — got that, Conney Island Pizza New York? And it’s hard to buy into any school that claims to be in western Pannsylvania, although this did purport to be a cooking school.

Another spam comment drew my attention to a ‘raw cooking school.’ What the hell is that?

Anyway, apart from stopping now and then at the loopy ones, I’ve developed a reasonably good speed at scrolling through all these spam comments. And our comments section has two buttons — ‘mark all as spam’ and ‘bulk moderate comments’ — that makes them quickly flushable.

So take your best shot, spammers. We like a little riddle now and then.

– Sid Leavitt