When I was a teenager, my music teacher always had a copy of the Real Book around. I went to a local music store and was looking through their music books when one of the employees asked, 'is there something I can help you find?' When I said the Real Book, he said, 'oh, we don't keep that out here'... he disappeared for a minute and came back with a copy from the back room. At the time, I felt like I had been admitted into a secret club.
The Real Book
41–50 of 143 posts
Re: The Real Book
#42When I was learning to play the saxophone my instructor had an old copy of the Real Book. The transcriptions of songs by some of the jazz legends would blow my mind. I thought the people being able to transcribe those were geniuses (still do). They had no sophisticated software to help them. It was all done manually by listening to countless hours of recordings over and over again. All those chord changes, harmonies,…
No sophisticated software, but you could take a turntable and play a 33 1/3 RPM record at half speed (16 2/3 RPM) and that would drop the recording by an octave but keep the notes the same.
Re: The Real Book
#43The Real Book is a great and weird learning tool. It's a rite of passage in jazz education to realise that your favorite tune isn't actually how it was written in the Real Book. Miles Davis didn't get it wrong -- the Real Book did! And just like that, you have your first bit of secret jazz knowledge... There are also some dated, now-seemingly-bizarre choices that were included. These quickly become in-jokes among fol…
To be fair, General Mojo's Well-Laid Plan is from "Duster" by Gary Burton's band with Larry Coryell, which is considered to be one of the first fusion records and was really influential at the time.
Re: The Real Book
#44I had the original Eb version but later bought the licensed C version. Some of my favorite tunes disappeared, now I understand what happened. Great article.
I remember learning to play classics but also just enjoyed reading along with stuff I had no chance of learning myself.
Re: The Real Book
#45The Real Book is a great and weird learning tool. It's a rite of passage in jazz education to realise that your favorite tune isn't actually how it was written in the Real Book. Miles Davis didn't get it wrong -- the Real Book did! And just like that, you have your first bit of secret jazz knowledge... There are also some dated, now-seemingly-bizarre choices that were included. These quickly become in-jokes among fol…
To be fair, General Mojo's Well-Laid Plan is from "Duster" by Gary Burton's band with Larry Coryell, which is considered to be one of the first fusion records and was really influential at the time.
Gary Burton was also a Berklee local, as were composers of many of the other seemingly obscure selections. Those tunes probably were in fact "standards" in that time and place, and through The Real Book, likely achieved more prominence than they would have otherwise.
I find it curious though that General Mojo didn't make it in to the Hal Leonard "6th Edition". I find it hard to believe that they couldn't secure the rights; did they just deem it too obscure? For trying to recreate the old book, seems like an unfortunate loss. Those tunes gave the book part of its character.
Re: The Real Book
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples of his awful opinions and ego? I’ve watched him occasionally over the years but haven’t noticed this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFaRIW-wZlw He doesn't really understand electronic music in my opinion. I find these sweeping statements about how "x ruined y" to be extremely lazy. Especially when it comes to comments about computers and music from these traditionally rock-ist people
Totally agree, needing to groove or follow harmony in some ways is a limited way of thinking about music. And my job is to teach people how to groove and follow harmony! One of my favorite types of music is electro acoustic because it is soooo far from the ideas of western music, probably most similar in formal structure. That being said Radio Head’s ‘Amnesiac’ is a superb example at bringing together the extended sonic pallets of electro acoustic in a main stream setting. What are some examples where you feel technology has enhanced traditional music forms?
Re: The Real Book
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guitar tab sites always had the same problem with bad transcriptions. Fortunately, there’s a whole generation of musicians that do fairly accurate “how to play” series on YouTube.
IMO Ultimate guitar has really great tabs for most reasonably popular songs. The ratings don't seem to be gamed as much as other sites as well. It's almost good enough to forgive all the shady UX patterns all over the site.
The current version of this website is so shaddy and specifically geared to destroy the original concept of tabs being easy to copy and edit. This website is now the antithesis of where it started. It is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the modern web.
Re: The Real Book
#48Someone should make an online "real book" for electronic music production, with a bunch of popular beats and instructions for how to reproduce them in a DAW. Does such a thing exist?
Other commenters have mentioned books with beats and patterns in them. While we're at it, here is a great one for classic (and not-so-classic) synthesizer sounds. "Welsh's Synthesizer Cookbook"
Re: The Real Book
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFaRIW-wZlw He doesn't really understand electronic music in my opinion. I find these sweeping statements about how "x ruined y" to be extremely lazy. Especially when it comes to comments about computers and music from these traditionally rock-ist people
Totally agree, needing to groove or follow harmony in some ways is a limited way of thinking about music. And my job is to teach people how to groove and follow harmony! One of my favorite types of music is electro acoustic because it is soooo far from the ideas of western music, probably most similar in formal structure. That being said Radio Head’s ‘Amnesiac’ is a superb example at bringing together the extended so…
Yeah, Radiohead are a great example indeed of bringing these two worlds together. Kid A is another amazing one from them.
When you say "traditional music forms" what do you mean specifically? I'm trying to avoid going down a rabbit hole of references which answer the wrong question :D
My answer to any question would change day to day really, especially at the moment as I'm finding lots of new and interesting ways to think about and approach production. Last night I was watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VspVQiG6hj8 (most well known as the artist Rrose making pitch black techno) which presents such a simple idea for creating an interesting drone sound using resonance alone & without any actual audio input.
I think a lot of the early IDM people like Aphex Twin, Autechre etc in their music have really used technology to push music beyond its traditional forms. And you have people like Oval that go with this kind of idea of "the medium is the message" (https://archive.aec.at/media/assets/b3d9569953edbc479d2a7bf6...) marking CDs to create glitches etc and surfing through filestystems to create microsamples
Re: The Real Book
#50Fascinating! It's sort of similar to "bootlegged" guitar tabs on alt.guitar.tab newsgroup and OLGA. There was lots of legal action by publishers and a lot of the content is now lost, or at least not easily accessible online anymore. ...except for an archive of the classical tabs, selflessly maintained by one guy: https://www.classtab.org/index_old.htm Don't tell anyone!
I’m feeling uneasy because I know there’s a whole generation of “one-person” shops which run these important websites. I hope they have a transition plan in place for the inevitable.