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This thread got me thinking... I don't think I've used iReal in a long time.
In my practice time I'm mostly using a metronome, looper, or Books with CD Play a long (ones with great players). I also use Capo for Mac which is great for slowing down and looping mp3s.
When I was using the robo jazz I completely removed the comping instrument. I feel the drums and bass are 'good enough' at playing the page, and the visual reference is nice. If nothing else it's cool to just have the vanilla changes as a pocket reference.
I think it would only cause harm if it was your only means of practice (or if you relied on the visual aid too much).
Back to the OP... I haven't used this book personally, but I've seen mentioned elsewhere in these forums as a good comping reference and play a long: VOLUME 54 "MAIDEN VOYAGE" GUITAR VOICINGS.
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03-02-2016 09:58 PM
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I have to admit I never really checked out iReal Pro. Not bad for a practice band. The sound and percussion is better than I expected. And it is hard to complain about the price, though I'm not sure if I saw the whole deal as regards add-ons or other issues.
Could someone who has both of these programs - BIAB and iRealPro - give their appraisal of relative merits of each program? It looks like the programming is relatively straight forward with iReal. If I understood correctly you cannot use one program for PC and Mac - it's one or the other?
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what i like about BB jazz guitar solos is the way it opens up the fingerboard...you get 6 choruses on each solo starting at the 3rd fret...at chorus 4 your on the 10th fret..and up to fret 15 ...my Peerless Monarch was hard to play up there...with the epiphone 175 a lot easier..intricate melodic soloing...and youll wonder how you got there....TY BB...
Last edited by voxss; 03-03-2016 at 06:53 AM.
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Well I have BIAB on a windows PC, and I have the IReal app on an iPad.
Originally Posted by targuit
BIAB is easy to enter chords, and sounds better because of the Real Tracks. But it's quite expensive. I assume there's a Mac version.
iReal doesn't sound as good, though it's not bad. The rhythm's a bit clunky and plodding though, by comparison. The chord entry looks a bit more fiddly than BIAB. But frankly you hardly ever need to enter a tune, because it comes with a link to the iReal forum where there is a free download of 1300 jazz standards. You download it once and all those tunes are then in the app. So far I have found very few tunes not in that list. The forum also has other free songlists for download, I also downloaded a Latin/Brazilian one with loads of tunes in it. Of course iReal is quite cheap because it's an app. I think there are iReal ported versions for Mac or Windows but no idea what these cost.
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Thanks for the review, Graham! I assume you make use of both. But if you had to ditch one, which would it be? Or from another angle, if you were trying to get as close to a decent backup track as possible, I imagine it would be BIAB that you would use for the Real Tracks "realism".
I was listening to the exposition videos on the iReal site and started to notice that the tracks kind of began to grind my ear a bit.
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Yes that is correct, I have used BIAB to create backings for some of my youtube videos, and for some of my Soundcloud 'practical standards' clips. (I've also used the iPad SessionBand app for a few of those too). Originally Posted by targuit
But I have never used the iReal app for those purposes. I tend to use it more as a quick reference tool to get the chord changes for a tune.
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03-03-2016, 08:34 AM #32destinytot GuestI couldn't agree more. (Beliefs are like sunglasses, filtering experience. But - unlike sunglasses - we can't simply take off our beliefs.) Originally Posted by christianm77
I think the same goes for loopers - though I do think they're a more effective form of 'scaffolding' for learning tunes (because the player is in the driver's seat).
Among devices, the best I've come across is the Freeze pedal - uniquely valuable for 'freezing' the chord of the moment so that you can explore it in detail... a helpful interaction that gives rise to focused melodic experimentation.
My two cents say 'build your repertoire based on what you love'.
And I'll add this: 'Slow down to speed up.'
I see that as the 'secret' to mastery - in 'minutes' – rather than an (overwhelming) '10, 000' hours. Here's why: “Every hour I am at the piano feels like a minute. Every minute I am away from the piano feels like an hour.” (Michel Petrucciani)
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There's a guy who busks playing the trumpet in the town where I work. He's not bad, he's got a great tone and he plays nice old standards like Autumn Leaves, American-songbook tunes, some Bacharach tunes etc. He embellishes the melody a bit but not really playing jazz solos as such. He plays with iReal backing tracks, I recognise them. In that context, they sound ok for what he's doing (they are only going through a cheap little amp anyway).
Sure sounds better than the other buskers we get, i.e. wannabe pop vocalists strumming an out-of-tune guitar (which is always amplified far too loud) and emoting with that peculiar nasal whine that passes for singing nowadays!
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Here in the US they often require you to have a license to abuse the public.
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haha, 'licence to abuse', not quite James Bond, but close! Originally Posted by targuit
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I have the "super ego" pedal which is the freeze pedal with some bells and whistles I never use, haha. Really neat effect. Sometimes I'll even use the freeze with the looper. Although I don't do that to practice jazz, just to create some weird alien textures. Originally Posted by destinytot
And your other two points deserve a round of applause
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I'm always interested in how rules get multiplied.
"Only transcribe by ear, off the record, vinyl preferably..."
"Band in a Box" will kill your ear and rob you of good feel
"Only practice with live human musicians, preferably while they are using drugs
More and more I appreciate the wisdom of people who just told me "Jump in. Play. Learn tunes. Do whatever you have to do to get better than you are. But Play. Learn Tunes. Have fun."
So I have terrible feel, no ear, and live where there are very few jazz players, and the ones who are around have no interest in playing with the likes of me... but I play everyday, with BIAB and iRealPro, I learn solos from notation, transcribe a little by ear, memorize canned licks, and yes, i sound like it.
But I'm having fun. This is not my religion.
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I'm not quite sure where the drugs thing came from, lol. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
Why not make a backing track and play to it instead? That would teach you more.More and more I appreciate the wisdom of people who just told me "Jump in. Play. Learn tunes. Do whatever you have to do to get better than you are. But Play. Learn Tunes. Have fun."
These things are relative Lawson. I enjoyed your playing of the Raney solo, for example, it was very musical.So I have terrible feel, no ear, and live where there are very few jazz players, and the ones who are around have no interest in playing with the likes of me... but I play everyday, with BIAB and iRealPro, I learn solos from notation, transcribe a little by ear, memorize canned licks, and yes, i sound like it.
I find your estimations of your musical ability to be a bit fixed, you could easily work on your feel and your ear for 10 mins a day, if you feel they need addressing, and perhaps even have fun doing it. This is what I do every day.
I often come away from gigs and rehearsals feeling that on a deep level I don't have a clue and am a terrible musician. But people still ask me to do stuff, so there must be some redeeming features. But it does make me want to improve.
Luckily, I enjoy the process of working on this stuff, but I doubt I'll ever be the type of musician of some of the guys I work with. I just want to be able to hang with them a bit better and do more projects..
This is a common way to feel for everyone I gather, even those at 'the top.'
Thing is there is no top. Either you are working on something (and enjoying working on it) or you are not. But life is too short to everything, so we have to pick our battles, like you say.
Do what gives you pleasure. But some pleasure needs to worked at - exercise for example. Music can be like that too.But I'm having fun. This is not my religion.Last edited by christianm77; 03-03-2016 at 12:46 PM. Reason: spellin
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Personally the thing I struggle with most ATM is this:
Playing the tune of the song correctly, in time, without any accompaniment or a click etc.
When I play an accompaniment to my recording of the melody that's the test.
Soloing - not a problem.
I wonder what I've spent the most time practicing for the last 20 years?
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I hear you, of course.
What I'm reacting against... and it is really just a reaction... is a tendency amongst us to erect a lot of barriers by espousing "rules." So yes, it might be "best practice" to transcribe by ear without even notating to learn a solo. That said, it is not a bad practice IMO to learn a solo from notation. In fact that does some good things. It improves sight-reading ability, enhances the sound-page link, the eye/mental ear connection, etc.
Of course, playing with "real" musicians is the best practice too. But failing that, making my own backing tracks just means I'm reproducing my own playing on a second level. A well designed backup program algorithm can really get a person a long way in their learning of tunes and practicing improvisation. I see a backup program as simply a very rich kind of metronome.
But to hear some people talk, you'd think this was the End of Jazz As We Know It.
Obsessive perfectionism can be the death of any endeavor, especially artistic ones. Just because I can't do the ideal doesn't make the less than ideal a bad thing. That UK jazz player cited above, well, he might be a great player, but I never want to meet him and I'd never take a lesson from him. Sounds like a person I don't need in my life.
As an educator, I've learned that not everyone who has mastered their subject has also mastered the best way to help others master it. Many who "can do" "can't teach." I put that guy in that category.
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the iRealB playalong is truly awful. It makes my cry it's so bad. Originally Posted by grahambop
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Very interesting to me that a topic called "Building repertoire" was actually a discussion about software.
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Yeah I get you. There's something dreadfully pompous about the tone of advice on the web, and it's so easy to lapse into it. So apologise for all the pompousness I have committed here and elsewhere. Also there's nothing more likely to make me react negatively than someone saying you 'should' this or that. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
I don't think any of us can do the ideal TBH. I'm pretty certain Metheny, Bernstein etc don't feel they have any hope of reaching the ideal themselves as much as we idolise them - simply because that's why it's an ideal. Listening to Peter's advice and humility in workshops etc, is a great way of reminding myself of that.
The older I get the less interested I am in trying to work out how good or bad my playing is. I don't think the question has any meaning because it is so relative. But there is always stuff to work on - things I hear, things others hear.
That said I feel I am starting to drill down into the basics of music to some extent. Every day I learn something new about the fundamentals, and the difficulty of the simple things. I certainly don't feel like there is such a thing as 'advanced' and 'beginner' in music. There are only fundamentals and the process for exploring them.
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I think the title was a bit of a misnomer really. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
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My impressions echo Graham's.
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These days I will only play along to 78s played on a wind-up gramophone. It is the only way to get the authentic feel. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
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Just sprayed coffee all over my keyboard due to explosive laughter. Thanks a lot Graham! Originally Posted by grahambop
Hated that keyboard anyhow.
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I have a basement full of the original wax cylinders made when Charlie Christian was taking his first guitar lessons and already inventing bebop. Nobody can really play TRUE bebop who has not transcribed these materials by analyzing the etching on the cylinders, then playing them back on a genuine 1930's era wax-cylinder-player-thingee. Originally Posted by grahambop
Now we have to drop back to "My grandfather has an old tape of his father singing the lines he remembers Bird played the night he and Diz first jammed... nobody can play bebop without internalizing those lines still in their embryonic fluid from Bird giving birth to them...
Okay I promise to stop. Lunch break has expired.
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that's a good observation Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
in the spirit of that, I am curious what some of you do to maintain the repertoire you have? Learning tunes is learning tunes. but once you learn one, what do you do to keep it?
I used to play a 6 nighter, back when there were such things, and I'd learn new tunes in the afternoon and tell the band leader which ones I learned that day. then he'd call them 3 or 4 times over the course of 9pm to 3am, then keep them in the set list for a few days to give me some reps
I suppose if you can do something similar with your software that would be worthwhile. somebody told me once that the difference between a pro and somebody who just plays is that an amature practices until they get something right, but a pro practices until they can't get it wrong.
so I guess that's why I got in the habit of playing a tune for a while more after I have it together
...and now back to the software discussion
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I agree completely! these kids today, they get a leg broke and they start complaining Originally Posted by lawson-stone
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Autumn Leaves (Fingerstyle Chord Melody)
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