Hal Leonard Does the Right Thing

We love Hal Leonard’s fine GuitarInstructor.com website, and we spend a lot of money there downloading song TABs and play-along tracks and teaching videos.   GuitarInstructor.com recently launched a new Guitar Chords/Lyrics feature where, for about a dollar, you can download “one sheets” for over 5,000 new songs.  That means you get the lyrics and simple chord patterns, but no actual guitar TAB.  These one sheets are more for strumming and/or cheat sheets used in a live performance.  I decided to buy one of those one sheets for the great Bob Dylan song — “Make You Feel My Love” — and I was disappointed that my purchase of that song looked and printed out just as you see below. I blurred most of the chords and lyrics on purpose to protect the song from being printed out from this review and used for free.

Here are close-ups of the problem.  The file name of the song hosted on the Hal Leonard server is printed on the page:

You can also see the publishing marks:

I immediately wrote to GuitarInstructor.com support to tell them this sort of print job was not up to Hal Leonard’s standard of excellence.  I included a screenshot of the problem just as I have for you here.

A few days passed, and I was expecting to get a “it doesn’t happen on my machine!” response, because I’ve had other problems in the past with that Hal Leonard website, and the replies have been cold and unhelpful in the least and that sort of sours you on wanting to buy future titles.

I was surprised to receive a reply that they were, indeed, having a publication problem on the Mac platform with the new Chord/Lyric one sheets and that they’d get back to me when the problem was fixed.

I waited a few more days.  Then, GuitarInstructor.com support touched in and told me the problem was solved!  They also reset my account to allow me to re-print the one sheet to get a pristine copy of the song.  Hal Leonard did the right thing.

Here is what the fixed version of the song looks like.  You can see the entire page is fuller and the lyrics and chords now fill the page.  Again, I purposefully blurred out most of the detailed bits to protect the Copyright of song from content thieves:

I appreciate the transparency in working with Hal Leonard to get this problem solved.  They could’ve blamed me, or my computer, but they didn’t.  They actually took my complaint to heart, found the problem, implemented a fix, and won over a loyal customer again.

Now, buying a song for a dollar is great in isolated/emergency cases — but if you’re a Big Bob Dylan fan — you’d want to buy a “Definitive Collection” of his songs. I have a big Dylan guitar songbook here with over 300 songs. Buying each song for a dollar would price that book at $300.00USD. I paid $27.50USD for the book new.