Special versions for printing:
Unilaiva Songbook is a free and open-source multilingual songbook of healing music, created for non-commercial ceremonies, singing circles, and shared musical spaces.
The songs in this collection are gathered and transcribed through the contributions of many people, from a variety of audio and written sources, and through the living practice of singing, playing, dancing, listening, sharing, studying, and learning together. This is an ongoing work, offered with Gratitude and Love.
Navigating the Site
The songbook has two variants represented by the cards above: the full one with chords, and one with lyrics only. View them here or download them to your device. Alternate viewing options, links to special printout versions, and audio can be found on the backsides of the cards. Tap or click the top right corner of a card to flip it around.
Through the hamburger menu in the top left corner of the page one can navigate between this page and the songbook variants, or change the language the site is displayed in.
Viewing
This site uses a custom viewer built for displaying the songbook documents as well as possible. If you download a songbook and view it with your local PDF viewing software, please note the following:
The book is best displayed as two pages side-by-side, if screen space allows: even-numbered pages on the left and odd-numbered on the right. To achieve this in your PDF viewer, choose "Even spreads", "Facing pages (center first page)", "Cover Facing Page", or similar option. Many songs span two pages, and the book is designed in such a way that such songs will always start on an even-numbered page.
Please note that as more songs are added, the song numbers might change, so there exist different versions of the book with differing numbers for the songs. The version on this site is always the latest.
Printing
The book is designed to be printed on A5 size (148 mm x 210 mm) paper double-sided with odd-numbered pages on the right side (recto) of a spread. This ensures that songs spanning two pages don't require flipping of pages when playing them. The book is intended to look good as black and white, but using colour printer improves its appearance and readability, while non-black inks are used sparingly. For binding, wire binding is recommended, because it allows 360° rotation of the pages for holding with one hand, and also enables the book to lay flat and stay open when placed on a surface.
If you ask a print shop to print the book for you, provide them with the default version. They know what to do with it.
Printing at Home
You could simply print the default version of the book (single or double sided) with any printer, but most likely your paper size is bigger than A5, so you will either have big scaled up pages or pages with enormous margins, depending on the printing software settings. Also, if you try to use the print application's "two pages per sheet" option, it will by default put odd pages on the left side, which is incorrect and requires page flipping within songs.
A better way is to download a special version for printing. These can be found on the flipsides of the songbook cards above. Please be sure to check printout type specific information found through the icons next to the printout download links.
Contributing
The songbook sources are available on Github. Contributions are welcome! If you don't find working with tools like Git, LaTeX and Lilypond appealing, you can also email corrections, comments, images, ideas, poems, prayers, new songs, recordings, and whatever else in any format you like. Find the email link below.
If you use this songbook, it would be really nice to read a few words stating so in an email, to keep the motivation up for further developing the book. 😊
Copyright and Licensing
Unless otherwise noted, the editorial material in these songbooks — including musical transcriptions, chord charts, arrangements, engraving, and typesetting — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Many songs included in this collection are traditional folk songs and are believed to be in the public domain. When known, the source or author of each song is indicated.
Some songs may still be protected by copyright. Such material is included either with permission or in good faith for educational and community use.
The Creative Commons license applies only to the editorial contributions made in this edition and does not affect the copyright status of the underlying songs where such rights exist.
Every effort has been made to identify and credit rights holders where possible. If you believe that any material in this book infringes copyright, please contact the editors so that the matter can be reviewed and the material corrected or removed if necessary.
These songbooks were produced using the Unilaiva Songbook System (ULSBS), which is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later (GPL 3.0+).
