Abstract
This is quick intro to the Songbook section I've added to this site recently.
I haven't written anything on this blog recently, but I wanted to share something cool that I have started adding to it.
If you check out this link, you'll see a new section, "My Songbook". I've been spending more time with my ukulele this year, and I've also been working on my singing skills. Of course, this means that I've been learning to play more songs.
I grew up playing the classical trumpet all through school. I had a great time playing in an orchestra. Then when I started studying electrical engineering at university, I couldn't find the time to keep up my trumpet practice routine. I started dabbling with the ukulele on the side, having fun but never really taking it too seriously.
There's something annoying that I found as someone classically trained approaching the ukulele: the sheet music I found for songs often only had half the content! Often it would have lyrics and chords, but it assumed that already knew the melody and the rhythm of the lyrics. So to learn a song it wasn't enough to have the sheet music, you'd also need a recording of someone else singing the song!
That's why I've started writing down the songs I learn. I use Lilypond to typeset it, which is basically a program where you write your music as source code and compile it to a PDF score. One way to think about Lilypond is that it's like LaTeX, but for sheet music. Or coming at it from a different direction, it's a programming language that is mostly used to produce sheet music. It even has common programming language structures like variables, and functions using Lisp.
I've built the Lilypond support directly into my static site generator, so in my blog's sorce code I have Lilypond files sitting alongside Org-mode files and it figures it all out. Each score gets an HTML page with SVG images of the score, and a PDF download.
In the future I plan on adding more songs, and as I get more familiar with Lilypond's more advanced capabilities I might even be generating multiple views on the same song.