Public-domain hymns, seeded in the key of D, with songs pending copyright clearance kept clearly marked and filterable. Every verse is here — click a verse's checkbox to mark it skipped for corporate singing, the household or class's own preference. Toggle lyrics-only or the chord chart, and transpose to see it on piano and guitar in another key.
Checking a song here also puts it in your Ready to sing list below the chart, for quick jumping — not just for the print job.
Nothing chosen yet — open Print several… below, or “Browse the whole book” further down, to build a list you keep coming back to.
Paste a chart the way you already write one — chord lines above the words they sit over, exactly as it comes out of your binder. That shape is what the book already stores, so the moment it is in, the Lyrics only toggle, the transpose control, the verse-skip editor and the print set all work on it like any other song. Mark it not cleared unless you are certain it is public domain; an uncleared song still prints for your own table, it just never leaves it.
Blank lines start a new verse. [Verse], [Chorus]
and [Refrain] headers are understood if you use them. A line made only of
chord names is read as chords for the line beneath it. Lyrics with no chord line above
them are fine — they simply print without chords.
Everything that syncs — your own songs, your edits to the shipped hymns, known-chord marks and preferred keys — in one file that stays yours, on this device, whatever else happens to the sync.
Every chord sits at one of three settings. Solid means you play it now without thinking; learning means it is in your hands but not yet in your sleep; not yet is the rest. The book uses all three — it will not suggest a key built on chords you have not got, and a chord you are learning counts for something but not for as much. Everything at not yet is the other half of the point: a shape sitting there waiting, with the easier version of it underneath where one exists. A chord marked • in the book turns up in a song here, so those are the ones worth learning first. What you set is kept with your own songs and follows you between your machines.
Goes with under each shape is the other half of the story. A chord is not hard on its own so much as hard after the one before it, and what makes a change feel like nothing is a finger that never leaves the board. C into Fmaj7 is the clean case: the index stays on the second string at the first fret and the other two fingers slide one string over without changing fret — the same shape, moved. The book works this out from the fingerings themselves and uses it to rank keys, so a song is offered in the key it actually moves best in, not just the one with the fewest sharps. A ° marks a change where a finger simply never leaves the board.
Geometry is not the whole story, though, so it does not get the last word. A, E, Am, Em, C, D, G and the open Fmaj7 are the chords every guitarist has, and the changes between them are drilled to reflex long before a barre is ever attempted — no finger stays down going from C to G, and it is still easy, because you have done it ten thousand times. So a change between any two of those is never scored worse than easy. Past that it becomes personal: a change between two chords you have marked solid is never scored worse than fair, which is how a chord that is yours and not everybody's — B7, say — stops being counted against you the moment you set it. And a third rung under that: if either chord in the change is a barre — F#, F#m, B, Bm — the best it can score is work, even when you play both, because a barre clamping on or coming off is real effort however well you know the shape. Past those three, nothing is capped: the hand travelling up the neck costs what it costs.
On the dulcimer the same three rungs mean different things, because the instrument is different. There are no barre chords at all, so the third rung is not about barres: it is about leaving first position — a shape above the fourth fret, or one that crosses the half fret, is doable and you know you did it. And what costs a dulcimer player most is not the shape but the travel: the hand slides along one narrow board all night, so a shape that moves up whole and unchanged — G to A is every course up one fret — is nearly free, while the same distance with the fingers rearranging is not. Two of the four shapes named on the guitar side, B and F# major, do not exist in DAd at all: each needs a note the diatonic fretboard does not have, so no fingering is offered rather than one invented.
Guitar fingerings read low E first, a dash for a muted string. Dulcimer diagrams are drawn as dulcimer tab is written — nut at the left, the doubled melody course on the top line, bass along the bottom — and the numbers under each one read in that same order, melody · middle · bass. All of them come from published charts rather than from theory, and the barre chords carry the commonly-taught smaller shape beside them.
Hymnals whose copyright has actually run out, with a link straight to a full, readable scan of each. Nothing here is ingested into the book yet — these are the quarries. Open one, find the hymn and the verses you want, and paste them in through Add a song, recording which book you took them from so the variant is traceable.
Suggested chord edits on the shipped, public-domain songs, sent in from any household using the suite — visible here only to you, the maintainer. Accepting one marks it ready to fold into the book; it does not change the live chart by itself, since the shipped songs live in songbook.html's own source and only change when that is edited and pushed. Declining just closes the suggestion out; nothing is deleted.
No suggestions waiting on you right now.