Welcome to Hymn Singer

Music can be more inviting and better presented, especially the oldies-but-goodies found in dusty hymn books. One shouldn’t need a music degree to learn and enjoy these musical works, nor should one need a law degree to feel safe singing, distributing, and modifying them.

No cost, no accounts, no catch, just 🎵 that wants to be free!

This site provides full sheet music and in-browser playback on every song’s page. If you’d like to learn one of the voice parts to a song, you can adjust individual volume levels to hear certain parts more loudly. If you need resources for a service, we have PDFs, Powerpoint Slides and more, free to distribute without restrictions.

Check out the Full Index of songs.

How it’s done

We “typeset” songs using Lilypond. Lilypond turns a musical code file into various output files which are used on the site. For example, after 15 minutes adding this one file describing “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee” to the mix, we get:

• 5 PDFs
• 3 PNGs
• 1 MIDI
• 1 MP3
• 1 beautifully formatted, verse-by-verse slideshow presentation
• 1 sleek webpage here on the site to display, play, and download.

Check out the Getting Started guide to learn the ropes yourself. (We are always open to having more contributors!)

Or, use this form to request an added song. Ensure that:

1. The copyright is permissive or it is in public domain
2. You can provide a link or quality photo for the sheet music

Regarding copyright, the songs hosted here have, to the best of our research, no copyright restriction. Please reach out using this form if we have erred and included a restricted work.