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My new book: 33 Songs for Toy Xylophones

I released a new paperback book recently, called 33 Songs for Toy Xylophones. It is a book of music scores for toy xylophones and metallophones (8 notes): It contains songs for children, as well as folk songs from around the world (Japan, France, Russia…). It uses special notation for 8-note instruments so that it can be used even if you don’t know the standard notation for classical music. Like my previous books, it was self-published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

Here is a zoom on a part of a score (can you guess the song?):

In addition, I have also laid out the scores in standard musical notation and they are available for download as PDF from the support page for the book.

Here is a sample PDF of the book with a few pages.

I have also created a video (generated using moviepy) featuring recordings of all the songs from the book:

The cover “chosen” by Youtube is a bit surprising: It is a picture from inside the book (to illustrate the song Row Row Row Your Boat) and also featured in the video for a few seconds.

Here are the links to buy the book on Amazon:

I intend to publish a French version of the book (and maybe Spanish and German) soon, with a slightly different selection of songs (more French songs).

Update January 2023: I have published some variations of the book in color (to fit the bar colors of specific xylophone models) and black and white in French, Italian and German (and soon Spanish). I have also made an A4 variant in English (both colors and B&W). The books have a different selection of songs depending on the language.

Here are some photos of the printed book I received a few days ago:

▲ The front cover, using the glossy finish. The book is square with dimensions 8.5" x 8.5".

▲ At 145 pages, it is quite thick.

▲ Preface.

▲ First page of the table of content.

▲ A score. Instead of using the standard notation for classical music, like I did for my previous music book, I made a special notation for 8-note xylophones (I had to write a software renderer for that so it was a bit of work).

▲ I have added a few illustrations in addition to the scores. Here is “Buyan Island” by Ivan Billibin, to illustrate the song “Kalinka”.

▲ The back cover with the ISBN.

On a technical level, I used a mix of software to create the book:

  • For the preface, since it was mostly text with a few images, I used Scribus.
  • For the scores themselves, as I mentioned, I wrote a custom renderer that takes as input the description of a score in Lilypond format. I did that in Python with the Cairo library.
  • I also used Python to merge the Scribus PDF part with the score part, in order to create the final PDF I uploaded to Amazon  KDP.
  • I used Inkscape for the cover and exported to an image. I then embedded the image inside a PDF for upload to KDP.

Some notes:

  • At first, I used gray lines for some parts of the score. But I should have realized KDP prints using black ink only (not gray levels): Gray is only rendered through dithering. So thin gray lines were a bit of a mess. I have changed it since then to only use black ink, but I am still awaiting my second proof copy to check if it is fine.
  • I used a gradient for the cover even though it is not recommended (KDP cannot print all the shades). At first, I didn’t see any banding so I was happy, but on the pictures of the cover I took for this article, I noticed some bands. And indeed there are some but it is not very visible: I don’t think I would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it.