Month: July 2018

Imagine a typical evening of Ukulele Fight Club. Everyone’s tuned up and ready. After some hesitation, someone names a tune and the scramble begins. Half the group starts flipping through giant notebooks while the other half uses phones and tablets to search multiple dropboxes. Sometimes everyone can find the song. Sometimes they even find it in the same key. But all too often the song is abandoned for lack of enough music to go around, a new song is selected,  and the searching begins again. In the end we spend more time searching for music than playing it.

The object of this website is to make that scenario a thing of the past. The site includes a combined songbook and a session list so everyone knows what we’re going to play, which version, and in what key.

This site is open / visible to the public. To contribute, add songs, or pick things to play you’ll need to create a login.

The songbook includes songs uploaded to this website, along with the contents of the Jefferson City and Columbia dropboxes. The dropboxes are polled weekly to incorporate any changes.

To add a song, follow the Add Song link. The preferred formats are PDF, ChordPro, and plain text. Other formats (MS-Word, PNG,…) are discouraged as they’ll make future improvements to this site difficult (e.g. putting together songbooks for events). Your song won’t immediately appear in the songbook. It gets queued for approval. We want a welcoming site, but we also need spam control.

A word about ChordPro. It’s an open standard for typesetting lead sheets. The files are plain text with (often) .pro for the file extension. The files contain instructions used by a ChordPro converter to generate a PDF. The converter can also generate chord charts (GCEA, EADGBE among others) and transpose.

The last part of the puzzle is the session list. It’s basically a list of links to songs folks want to play at our next fight club session. To add a song to the list, click the “+” next to the song in the song book. When you upload a song,  it’s automatically added to the list once it’s approved. The list is reset after each session.