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05-03-2024 02:29 PM
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I know.
Really complicated. Only for heavyweight techies :-)
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Charts are useful when playing cold. But my experience is the music gets deeper once they go away. I hate seeing them on a bandstand. I pride myself on always being the first person in the group to memorize a tune. I feel like I play better when I do too.
As for me, if I don’t know a song, I usually prefer for someone to walk me through it verbally (quickly) rather than look at a chart. After comping a couple choruses I think people should be able to play (ie comp and blow) a tune without looking. All depends on how complex the tune is.
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Tbh if you have a decent repertoire sometimes tunes are easier to learn by ear on the band stand. Used to be like that when I was playing with dance bands, three or four set gigs. No breaks between tunes to look through books, straightforward GASB and old jazz rep based on familiar chunks. Often tunes would get transposed on the fly as well. Charts not much good in that setting.
Obviously if you are playing modern rep it’s a different story. But even so there’s value in learning that material by ear if you want to add a tune to your repetoire. Anything that extends the ears is time well spent.
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 05-04-2024 at 12:00 PM.
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Found the first two new real books used for $25 total. First one comes today.
Oops.
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That’s all true and I agree with you. But it’s not practical for many gigs. These days, almost no one pays for rehearsals for non-recurring club dates (at least around here). If I asked a bass player and a keyboardist to get together with me for an hour or two to review a 3 set show for which we’re going to get $100 each to back a vocalist at a small local club, they’d think I was crazy. If it was a well known singer and/or at a top venue, we’d be getting a lot more and a rehearsal would be a condition for accepting the gig.
When I’m working with close friends or the other players are just happy to get together to play, a rehearsal works out well. But 3/4 or more of the 150 or so gigs I play in a year are done at least in part from charts or fakebooks. I prefer having my own sidemen using a fakebook or the printed pdfs I’ll hand out to keep us all on the same chords and form. It’s especially important for tunes none of us has played for a long time.
Even with this, I’ve had a few train wrecks. Having the chart in front of me keeps my focus on the show, even if I don’t need it. I admit to playing almost every tune from memory on my own gigs, and I only look at the tune list. One night a few years ago, I got to Tenderly on the list and immediately launched into a passionate rubato intro……for Misty, which I proceeded to play. Fortunately, the band had lots of time to correct course, and they were right there with me when the tempo hit. When I realized what I’d done, I couldn’t stop laughing - but the audience never seemed to notice that anything happened. I still haven’t heard the end of that one.
I set a theme for each of my trio’s Thursday night shows, and 2 weeks ago it was jazz versions of movie themes. I put a tune list that includes the specific fake book and page for each song on each music stand. One of the guys opened Blue Moon instead of Moon River, and he didn’t figure out that he wasn’t playing the same tune I was for several bars. I picked it up into the second bar and stopped playing the lead until I could get his attention. I got him onto the right tune, but it took at least 30 painful seconds during which time I went to fingerstyle until he stopped playing Blue Moon and opened the right chart. It was Chet Atkins plays Mancini for several bars.
I record most of my gigs for quality control. Every once in a while, I listen to these and more to remind me why I need to pay more attention to everything. You never miss your water ‘til the well runs dry.
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As a Software Engineer, I'd simply open the picture, usually by default in Windows it uses the Photos app for JPG pictures.
Then I'd use the following shortcut keys to rotate the picture and then save it. (Or you can click the buttons)
Rotate Picture: crt+r
Save Picture: crtr+s
Rotated Pic
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The guys who play the first group GASB and swing tunes are the OG realbook haters. That’s what I meant earlier in the thread when I said we don’t have the repertoire or volume of opportunity to learn these tunes the old way.
The big band I’ve played with rehearses every other month. The other big band out here rehearses once a year and plays 6 times a year.
Hard to develop an ear that way, compared to the old guard who played 4 hour gigs 7 nights a week, the jammed after hours. Maybe a few brunch or early hotel lobby gigs tossed in during the day.
Pretty easy to develop an ear that way compared to one gig a month and 3 tunes at a random jazz jam.
And like NSHSI said, nobody rehearses a pickup band for a one off $100 gig.
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Yeaaaahhhh. You know it’s just one of those things. There’s a bunch of tunes I half learned wrong on the stand and then had to relearn. It’s a complicated life journey.
I still find myself in situations with players who know a certain repertoire really well and I don’t know half of the calls.
Consider though that the two main skills you may need if you want to play gigs are ears/rep and reading.
Everyone’s route through this is different. The only advice I’d give is learn music you care about. If you are gigging there’s plenty of call to learn other peoples stuff haha.
It also depends where you live. A lot of London horn players are insane sight readers but don’t know many tunes (although some really do). So if you play tunes with those guys, charts are pretty normal, but the flip side is those guys really can read fly droppings. The people who really roasted me on rep were unsurprisingly visiting New Yorkers.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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That reminds me of when the Charlie Parker Omnibook first came out in the early 1980s. I was excited to see it but didn't notice it was the E flat version. Many tunes in G. It was good for practice in learning the phrases then using them in different keys. I never did get the C version.
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So... I found out the other day that there are a couple of dozen fake books (pdfs) on Scribd, including all the Real books (except I did not see Vol. VI). A free 30 day trial will allow you to download them all, plus many other music books. How they manage to evade copyright infringement law I don't know.
I discovered this when I was looking for info on this book and saw it was available on Scribd:
The Real Book, Enhanced Chords Edition by David Hazeltine
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Now that I've had a chance to browse the site, I see that Scribd is really just a promotion for their other product, Everrand, which is a subscription service that allows you to read books online, including music instruction and fake books. (You can't download them directly, you could download the page images but it would be a lot of work to make a pdf out of them). All the documents on Scribd were donated by users, and most of them can be found online elsewhere, so you're unlikely to see newer or rare materials there, e.g., there are no copies of Real Book volumes 5 & 6 - well, there is a poor copy of Real Book 6 which was taken from Everrand.
Crimson/Hutchins Gibson l5
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