digital sheet music on gigs

[Little Jay]

Hmm, the exuberant and ubiquitous spreading of (digital) sheet music on jazz gigs - even in the professional field - is seen by some as critical: Why You Shouldn't Be a Real Book Player | jazzadvice.com

Hmm, yeah. I try to learn as many tunes by heart as I can, but with a full time job and a family I just can't learn them all and my (digital) sheets allow me to always play along, so to me that's a good thing. But if you can't play at all without a RealBook that's no good indeed.

And yes, to get the most out of a tune I need to know it by heart for sure.

I think the Do's and Don't out of your quoted article are spot on!

[ah.clem]

hi Ken,
i have a few pdfs of scans various real books ...
would igigbook automagically index all the
tunes for me ?

(igigbook page says it will , but I can't understand how it would line up
the page numbers etc)

It looks like it builds indexes of tables of contents, so, perhaps it would do this. Once it has the tables, it can then build a listing similar to a spreadsheet or text file showing you where and in what book each song is located. They now have an Android version; I may try it out and see how it works. It would be really handy to have that feature.

Edit - LOL! Friggin' Apple Devs - says the app is incompatible with all 4 of my Android devices (phone, 3 tablets)! Yeah, typical. I don't miss having to deal with all this Apple crap anymore.

[ah.clem]

Any fake book is just a jumping off place - the only time I ever played the written changes in the books was when I was first learning, and with my first quartet (I was playing bass). I agree that one needs to internalize the tunes and melodies (and I eventually did), and I do this for my lessons now, but I still use a fake book to get the general lay of the harmony (especially on a tune I haven't played much or not at all) but then I start adding in subs, making it my own song ("blocking it out", putting a chord under every note of the melody). I also use them to practice sight reading and comping with the goal of being able to "see" the subs on the fly. And let's be realistic, I think we're all pretty much "Sunday Players" here; very few of us are making a living doing this. In my opinion, that's a whole different world. If I scan in a page with my subs written in, I'm not gonna feel guilty using it at a jam if I have to. And having a chart in front of you when you get lost in a fast tune with five or six other players on the stand is priceless; better than trying to watch the piano player's hands or playing a drone or ostinato until you figure out where everyone else is (speaking with my bass player's hat on).

[feral guitar]

+1 on learning tunes

I've used the seventhstring website for years at home to search my fakebooks:
The Fake Book Index
as far as I can tell, they don't offer it for download - which would be great for a gig application...

any other downloadable resource like that?
It would be a bitch to separate tunes out from the books...

[iGigBook]

hi Ken,
i have a few pdfs of scans various real books ...
would igigbook automagically index all the
tunes for me ?

(igigbook page says it will , but I can't understand how it would line up
the page numbers etc)

iGigBook has indexes for many of the popular fake and real books. The key to success is making sure the PDF that you have has all of the pages and that the pages are in the correct order. Often times people will download a PDF from the internet and assume that it is intact meaning all the pages are there and in the correct order. Many times pages such as photographs are removed, or promotional material is added to the front of the PDF.

i Gig Book - Index page contains an extensive how to section that deals with issues of getting an index to fit a PDF that you have.

[Little Jay]

I have Adobe Professional, and that let's you work on PDFs so you can add blanc pages and remove unwanted ones, to correct a PDF-file so it's equal to the index. Seems a lot of work, but you only have to do it once

[kenbennett]

Most of the ones I have worked:

The Book
Bill Evans Fake Book
Classic Real Book
Classic Real Book Vol. II
Classic Real Book Vol. III
Jazz Fakebook
Jazz LTD
Library of Musicians Jazz
The Colorado Book
The New Real Book Vol 1
The New Real Book Vol 2
The New Real Book Vol 3

And there are about that many more that didn't work. But I don't miss them.

[iGigBook]

It looks like it builds indexes of tables of contents, so, perhaps it would do this. Once it has the tables, it can then build a listing similar to a spreadsheet or text file showing you where and in what book each song is located. They now have an Android version; I may try it out and see how it works. It would be really handy to have that feature.

Edit - LOL! Friggin' Apple Devs - says the app is incompatible with all 4 of my Android devices (phone, 3 tablets)! Yeah, typical. I don't miss having to deal with all this Apple crap anymore.

The indexes provided by iGigBook were created by taking the table of contents of each book and manually creating an index for it and verifying that if matches the table of contents of the book. This is done so that when you search for a tune like "Autumn Leaves" and receive many results, you can pull the correct chart from whichever book it may be in.

The Android version of iGigBook only works with Android tablets that are running Android 5/Lollipop or greater. It doesn't work on Android phones or tablets running KitKat.

[ah.clem]

The Android version of iGigBook only works with Android tablets that are running Android 5/Lollipop or greater. It doesn't work on Android phones or tablets running KitKat.

Understood. That is less than 25% of the Android market. I'm not certain what functionality you get from Lollipop that you can't also get in Kitkat and grab a larger market, while not making users choose between apps that will work between the two OS, but this is the wrong place to be discussing this, I guess. Good luck with your app. As usual, this is all just my opinion. Happy to chat off-list if interested.