Hello my name is Dan and I’m a ukulele player.
One night in 2009 I stumbled upon a Hey Jude of ukulele players in a dimly lit basement in SoHo. It was amazing and I was hooked. I bought a ukulele that week and started joining their weekly shenanigans.
Fast forward a decade and a bit and I move from the big smoke to the Isle of Wight, and I wanted to recreate that magic here. I succeeded, setting up VULGA (Ventnor Ukulele Lubbers General Assembly) in the back of a small pub and it is now a weekly fixture in the towns calendar.
There was only one problem. Maintaining a songbook is an absolute royal pain.
Originally we would compile it in Word, but this was massively labourious. I thought about migrating it to HTML, but signal can’t always be guaranteed and it could potentially be messy when creating one-off books for events.
So I did what any sane person would do and decided to learn LaTeX.
LaTeX is a typesetting language used by intelligent people such as scientists and mathemeticians. Perfect for a ukulele songbook then.
Thankfully I found a project which had already done a fair bit of the legwork. It could generate chord shapes and create a book with contents and all kinds of useful stuff. But it was limited.
So I ripped it apart and created a behemouth of a script which accomplishes many, many tasks making the creation of a songbook an absolute scinch.
Firstly I split out a whole heap of options in to a config file. This had many advantages.
- Multiple songbooks could now be configured. Create a LaTex document listing the individual songs you want in the book and point the config file to it. Everything else will then be taken care of.
- Splitting out of chord shapes to different files. Got a baritone ukulele? Create a chord file with the finger positions and now our standard book will work for you. Hell, got a guitar? Go for it! Just expect lots of tutting. Does a song have a chord shape you haven’t configured? Don’t worry, the PDF thats created will list missing chorsd at the end of the doc.
This was tricky. LaTeX is not an easy thing to get to grips with, especially when you’re trying to use it in a way that wasn’t particularly intended.
However what we have now is a very flexible way of generating song books in a way that someone other than me should be able to configure without issue. New songs can be added easily, and I don’t have to worry about any of the design part at all and just focus on getting the music on paper.
I still have cleanup and things I want to achieve so this isn’t currently publicly available on GitHub but will be released on an open license by the end of the year.