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The Real Book

99percentinvisible.org

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Re: The Real Book

#61

Post by dhosek »

jpitz wrote: post #39
pthreads wrote: post #4

When 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,…

I've spoken to a few professional arrangers, and I always ask "How many times did you have to listen to that to write it down?" "Just once." Genius indeed. Or 10,00 hours. Or both.

I had the misfortune of having a friend in high school who could listen to something and transcribe it. I remember at band camp watching him with a cassette player and manuscript player transcribing an instrumental break from a Chicago song. He'd play a couple seconds, score it out, then play a couple more seconds until he was done.

I say misfortune because I assumed this was a binary thing: you either could do it or you couldn't, and I was in the latter category. Later in life, I found that it was a learnable skill (probably what did more than anything else for me in developing my ear was being part of the cathedral choir and doing a lot of sight singing in harmony) (another aside, having done a lot of church music over the years, it was interesting to see the level of musicianship of the cathedral choir, and I was in the larger amateur group rather than the smaller professional group—where in most church choirs, each section would have their part played at the piano and they'd sing it back, the cathedral choir would have all four parts played together at the piano and everyone would sing back in harmony. The professionals didn't bother with the piano part and just sight-sang everything, including some really tricky harmonies, like having the sopranos sing a high F against an E minor chord in the lower voices.) At my peak, I was able to work on writing music while walking without any instrument and come home and transcribe what I'd written including all the harmonizations. I've lost some of that skill from lack of practice in the years since and I had to use Capo to recover the chord progression of a piece I wrote where I couldn't remember one of the chords in the middle 8.

So bottom line, there are some people for whom this comes naturally but it is absolutely a learnable skill.

Re: The Real Book

#62

Post by dhosek »

Back in the 90s, one of my friends excitedly declared that she'd managed to get her hands on an illegal real book. At her birthday party, I found myself at the piano playing requests from it, but I wasn't familiar with the convention used in the book to write, e.g., C- for Cmin and I had assumed that the dash meant a diminished rather than minor chord. I had some really weird harmonizations coming out of that.

Re: The Real Book

#63

Post by leephillips »

zimpenfish wrote: post #13
pthreads wrote: post #4

When 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,…

> They had no sophisticated software to help them. Which is a shame because they sometimes make bad transcriptions... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFWCbGzxofU is a deep dive by Adam Neely into "Girl From Ipanema" covering how "The Real Book" neutered the blues countermelody because ... someone just didn't write it down in the 70s and everyone learns it from TRB now.

This video is absolutely fascinating. Thank you!

Re: The Real Book

#64

Post by mh8h »

Saw the title, and thought it is going to be about what Erdos referred to as The Book, in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem.

Re: The Real Book

#65

Post by allknowingfrog »

In case anyone missed it, this article is just the text summary that goes along with an episode of 99% Invisible. It's my favorite podcast, and I would encourage any HN fan to check it out.

Re: The Real Book

#66

Post by FabHK »

mh8h wrote: post #64

Saw the title, and thought it is going to be about what Erdos referred to as The Book, in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem.

Incarnated as the wonderful Proofs from THE BOOK by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_from_THE_BOOK

> During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."

Re: The Real Book

#67

Post by capableweb »

jeffbee wrote: post #55
h2odragon wrote: post #53

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat Illegal sheet music, underground comics, the "Anarchist's Cookbook" and similar... long tradition.

I don't know if that analogy holds. A fake book is indispensable for working dance bands who want to play at banquets or whatever where someone will request songs the band hasn't played before. The Anarchist's Cookbook is just for teenagers to download and feel like they are sticking it to the man. There are not, to my knowledge, a whole lot of practicing anarchists.

> The Anarchist's Cookbook is just for teenagers to download and feel like they are sticking it to the man

It does contain instructions on how to manufacture some smaller types of explosives and other goodies, so it's not completely useless. It was also initially released before the internet, and since the creation of the internet, lost a bit of it's usefulness of course.

> There are not, to my knowledge, a whole lot of practicing anarchists.

Maybe not where you live, but anarchism lives on across the world and you can find practicing anarchists inside most states around the world today, some groups bigger than others, CNT and FIJL being probably some of the bigger ones today.

Re: The Real Book

#68

Post by JoshCole »

dhosek wrote: post #61
jpitz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spoken to a few professional arrangers, and I always ask "How many times did you have to listen to that to write it down?" "Just once." Genius indeed. Or 10,00 hours. Or both.

I had the misfortune of having a friend in high school who could listen to something and transcribe it. I remember at band camp watching him with a cassette player and manuscript player transcribing an instrumental break from a Chicago song. He'd play a couple seconds, score it out, then play a couple more seconds until he was done. I say misfortune because I assumed this was a binary thing: you either could do it or…

This is true of other skills that seem magical. One that stands out to me as being learnable, but often seen as magical, is 'savant like' memory capabilities.

People assume that these people have different minds and that is how they have such incredible recall, but the truth is our memories are really strong when the recall is a spatial query and the object being recalled is encoded well. People mistake their short term memory for their actual memory and they often don't do the work of encoding and decoding their thinking to improve its compression properties. This leads to the impression that our memory capabilities are much worse then they are.

If you properly encode the memory into a spatial context you can have rather incredible feats of memory. It just takes work to do the proper encoding and decoding and the creation of spatial contexts in which to store the things you want to remember.

That happens often with things that seem magical. Edward Tufte had an amazing observation about magic that really sticks with me: magic is an art of misinformation wherein the objective is to hide the work that was done. Oftentimes magical things are things which take a lot of work, but that work is hidden.

Re: The Real Book

#70

Post by tonystride »

matthewh806 wrote: post #49
tonystride wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yeah 'traditional music forms' was a poor choice of words, guess I meant western music, or modern popular styles.

I really love synthesis & IDM but I tend to gravitate more towards soundscape compositions that are made of samples that have been abstracted to varying degrees. For example here's a piece I made that loosely follows Sonata form but has very little harmony or rhythm. Made completely of samples from an outside field and my living room. https://soundcloud.com/anthony-nagid/the-reality-sculptor-st...

Thanks for the essay, I'll put that in my que! There's a book I really like on 'The Art of Sound Organization' that got me into these styles. https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Art-Sound-Organization-...

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