Personal songbook to give to others

Subject: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Marion
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 02:35 PM

Hello gang. I've been doing a lot of songwriting lately and would love to have other people adopt some of my songs. Rick suggested to me that a good way to facilitate that would be to make up a personal songbook, with lyrics, chords, and melody if not a borrowed one, and carry it around and give it to anyone who seems interested.

Are any of you Mudcat songwriters doing something similar? If so, what kind of format do you prefer? I've got in mind three possible ways I could approach it:

1. Make up little booklets, with the leadsheets for several of my best-liked songs fastened together.

2. Fill a binder with several copies of each song sheet, organized with dividers, then hand out individual pages on request. Less paper wasted, easier to keep up to date, but doesn't allow a person who requested one song to discover another they like.

3. Get a free website and put up lyrics, chords, and abc files for melodies there. Then I can just tell people the website address. Handiest for me, but possibly less handy for other people.

What do you think? I realize approach 3 isn't mutually exclusive with 1 and 2.

Marion

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: GUEST, no, really ...
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 02:47 PM

Didn't your mother tell you never to give it away?

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 03:19 PM

*grin* I just point people to www.mudcat.org.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 03:20 PM

For singers, the binders are probably the most useful. I'been collecting all the songs I wrote for Challenges and similar things in a PDF file. That's easier to manage electronically.

A

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: GUEST,MMario
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 03:28 PM

each method has it's benefits

for ease of distribution i'd say the individual page/binder method

for nice little "gifts" - the booklets

for mass sharing - the web.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: wysiwyg
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 03:33 PM

If you want to retain management of info, such as who has what, and harvest email addy's for promotional mailing lists, all you really need to carry is a business card. People can email you for items of interest from perfromances or from hearing CDs you sell, and you can email them a PDF or GIF or whatever, or a URL to a site to hear them.

I point people to Mudcat too, but not everything I have to share is here. Sharing is not the same as giving, tho a lot of people think it is, and that it is OK to xerox things without asking. What I post online and point people to is what I would not mind people xeroxing. But if I create a product that represents a lot of effort over a period of time-- something I consider a product they can only get from me and as a result of that effort-- then there is a charge. Not a lot, but enough to help fund my next area of interest or my next period of effort.

For instance people have said to me that we ought to have our church service on tape to give out. (Our gospel band's songleading is why.) I have a few. Some of these "field" recordings will be remastered to a CD. I give away the tapes but the CD represents real work, and real costs I have incurred to do the work. I will give some to friends and to people who have sent me their CDs, but where it is possible to sell them, I will. I also will put some of the better tracks up on a website, so I can use that to help promote what we do out in the community-- but not the whole CD.

It helps to make these decisions if you have a clear sense of your overall goals and of the results you want for your various sub-goals. These can change over time, so you will want to plan something that can be adjusted later, but a key commonality in most musicians' goals is collecting information for use later. You might not know, right now, what you would do with the information, but it's handy to have it when a bright idea comes along.

~Susan

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: GUEST,Russ
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 07:54 PM

Create the booklet as a computer file. Convert it to a PDF file. Burn it onto a CD. Create a nifty CD label and Jewel case insert.

That's what I've done for my music club. We used to give out paper songbooks but now we give out CDs. I use mine on my laptop. Others print paper copies.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From:
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 08:21 PM

I use the method Russ suggests. I have three different formats.

1 - 8.5x11" Letter sized pages 1 song per page or 2 using double sided
2 - Booklets 5.5x8.5" 4 songs per page, double sided.

3 - Card sized 4.25x5.5" 8 songs per page, double sided.

Of course as you go up in songs per page, the harder it is to accomplish, and takes planning to work out what songs go where, if you're working alphabetically.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From:
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 08:23 PM

IF someone wants them, I can supply blank versions of the latter two to show how I do it. I can send them to people via e-mail as Word documents or RTF documents if that is easier. I can supply PDFs of some of the booklets as well for examples.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From:
Date: 17 Jun 04 - 08:36 PM

Oh, the same blanks/templates can be used on Legal sized or A4 or some other size by changing a few dimensions on the Tables I used.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Marion
Date: 18 Jun 04 - 09:03 AM

Thanks for your thoughts so far. WYSIWYG, colling contaact info is an element I hadn't considered, but you have a good point.

Marion

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: GUEST,Cats at work
Date: 18 Jun 04 - 09:39 AM

We frequently let people have copies of 'Heslop' songs by keeping 2 or 3 A4's with dots in the camper van. If you run out you can always take an address and post it on to them. If they don't read dots you can always volunteer to sing it onto a tape/cd /mindisc or whatever (Cylinder if you like!.) But.. I would really impress on you that you should make sure they are all copyrighted before you give them out. If you are a member of MCPS /PRS so much the better as if they are recorded / sung / played publicly then you get the credit for your own work. Money doesn't really come into it unless someone really big is going to record one of them so no jibes, please, about money. Songwriters get pence per 1,000 of tracks unlike the artists and big record companies. A friend of ours once got 5p for the karioake version of one of his songs!
If you don't know how to copyright them give Jon a ring and he'll help.

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: InOBU
Date: 18 Jun 04 - 10:04 AM

Hi Marion:
Kev McGrath and I have both done the same... Kev took the sensible root, small booklets on colored paper, maybe a quarter page folded over and stapled with oh... about five sheets to make 10 pages, he can carry a bunch around in his pockets. I wnet another rout... I used to put together a song sheet for radio hosts on progressive stations like WBAI, the important thing was the issue and words, and I can't read music anyway, so it was a photo of the issue, a vissual hook so to speak, under that a paragraph of the facts, and to the left of the that the song.
As the songs became too numerous, it began to become a booklet, now 56 pages with a color cover on heavy stock. I get a small break from a printer who's national concerns I cover in a few songs (he's from Bangladesh) so with some breaks the books are around $5.00 a piece but the expence is worth it for the use, in that one needs to have a professional looking package to get radio play (which you should think about as you are very very good... and your songs are really really good... up there with the best buskers I know - which encludes a lot members of some of the best bands in Ireland ... )
I used Microsoft Publisher, but that makes for BIG files. I'd PM McGrath of Harlow and swop some song sheets for some of his great wee books. For that matter, send me an address and I will send you up one of mine as well.
Cheers and lasho dromensa
Larry

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Marion
Date: 05 Jul 04 - 10:52 PM

Hi gang. Sorry for the delay in following up - I've been incomputicado for a bit. I think I'm going to go with both the website idea and carrying a binder that I can distribute individual songsheets from. But I think I'll take Cat's advice in joining SOCAN and registering the songs there first.

Larry, I'm so glad that you liked what you heard. I do expect to send you a longish tape later this summer. I find it interesting that your songbook is mostly intended for radio hosts rather than potential singers. I assume the idea is that the hosts will browse through it and see what kind of thing you write about, then be inspired to play or listen to the CD? Do you really find that people are more willing to browse through a booklet than a CD? I would have expected the opposite. I'm assuming that my target readership is people who have heard a song and want to learn to sing it.

Cheers, Marion

PS. "colling contaact info": I should have known better than to try to communicate at 9 o'clock in the frigging morning...

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 06 Jul 04 - 01:44 AM

New word: "incomputicado" - unable to communicate with friends and acquaintances due to the computer being kaput!

Robin

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Wilfried Schaum
Date: 06 Jul 04 - 02:49 AM

Very good pun indeed, Marion - where one should expect incommunicado the cause is given, too.

Wilfried

Subject: RE: Personal songbook to give to others
From: Gurney
Date: 06 Jul 04 - 03:04 AM

Wish I could write songs that someone would sing.
Most of the odd songsheets that I've collected over the last 35 years have been had from people's gigs, and some people, for instance Les Barker, sell them.
In your case, I think that I'd get a free website containing my songbook among other things, and see if I could get a link from Mudcat or somewhere suitable.
In addition, I'd also carry around a few prints of the more requested songs, suitably decorated with clipart (Using templates), and if asked, I'd first say "Are you on the web?.......