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The Real Book

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Re: The Real Book

#91

Post by anchpop »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #50
hoytech wrote: post #36

Fascinating! 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.

Yeah. I got nervous so I downloaded the site and put a mirror up on IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWG7VPMwC6T1PCp5G77AjrLCJMrmSQshYovf3i...

It's not perfect, because if he updates his site my mirror won't necessarily be updated, but hopefully it's better than nothing. I'm pinning that on two seperate computers so it should have some resiliency, but if someone else wants to pin it too that'll do a lot for keeping it up.

Re: The Real Book

#92

Post by biggieshellz »

barrenko wrote: post #86

Since this is HN, any advice for someone wanting to get from basically zero music knowledge to reading and playing jazz stuff? Let's say keyboard or guitar. I do know some music theory from elementary / high school.

I'm going to give different advice from the other person. Start out getting some basic technique and reading ability, but when you want to play jazz stuff, it's really a language. Learn by imitating -- transcribe (by ear) and play other people's solos and try to get the articulations, dynamics, rhythms, and so forth exactly right. Train your ear -- learn to hear the different chord colors (major/minor/dominant/diminished/half-diminished) and degrees of the scale.

A lot of this can be self-taught, but it really helps to have a mentor, and lessons can really be helpful. That's what I did when I initially learned in high school. Go on your own until you hit a roadblock or get stuck in a rut, then take a lesson.

Also, don't forget that jazz is a communal activity. After you achieve some base level of competence, you really need to start playing with other people, and preferably other people who are better than you are.

Re: The Real Book

#93

Post by dang »

wazoox wrote: post #3

Why did you change the title?

HN's debaiting software did. We changed it back.

Submitters: if HN's software edits a title badly, you can override that by clicking 'edit'. Just please don't restore clickbait.

Re: The Real Book

#94

Post by biggieshellz »

cousin_it wrote: post #6

Someone 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?

They had them for Minimoogs, where you could buy a book of patches with the control settings to get different sounds, including those from some popular songs: http://www.synthzone.com/midi/moog/minimoog/MINIMOOG%20PATCH...

But that doesn't convey the melody/harmony/rhythm, only the sound design.

Re: The Real Book

#95

Post by cjaybo »

barrenko wrote: post #86

Since this is HN, any advice for someone wanting to get from basically zero music knowledge to reading and playing jazz stuff? Let's say keyboard or guitar. I do know some music theory from elementary / high school.

I've played both piano and guitar for over a decade, at what I'd consider to be a relatively advanced hobbyist level. I enjoy playing jazz, but I'm not so sure anyone would enjoy listening!

For me, lots of theory concepts "click" more easily on the piano. I think it's partially a visual thing -- on a keyboard things like intervals are visually apparent (how many keys are between these two notes), whereas it requires a bit more mental overhead to conceptualize the same things on a guitar fretboard.

I greatly prefer to discover and play around with new musical ideas on the keyboard first for this reason. Others' mileage may vary!

As far as resources go, I'm a fan of Mark Levin's "The Jazz Theory Book". It starts with basic theory then works through more advanced concepts.

Re: The Real Book

#96

Post by ed25519FUUU »

anchpop wrote: post #91
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. I got nervous so I downloaded the site and put a mirror up on IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWG7VPMwC6T1PCp5G77AjrLCJMrmSQshYovf3i... It's not perfect, because if he updates his site my mirror won't necessarily be updated, but hopefully it's better than nothing. I'm pinning that on two seperate computers so it should have some resiliency, but if someone else wants to pin it too that'll do a lot for keeping it up.

Thank you for doing the good work.

Re: The Real Book

#97

Post by biggieshellz »

aphextron wrote: post #74
p_j_w wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not familiar with what those old philosophers said and how their arguments work, you're liable to make yourself look like a fool when you tread old ground not realizing it's old. Similarly with Jazz, if you wanna be avant garde, you should have some idea of the body of work that's come before you. A lot of the best musical rule breakers were classically trained and knew their shit.

>A lot of the best musical rule breakers were classically trained and knew their shit. Classical training is a different story. Musical theory is endlessly useful to know. But jazz has been stuck in a certain kind of sound for the last 40 years since those people who actually made it gave way to those who simply play it . And now there's just this idea of what jazz is and ought to be, rather than treating it as what…

"a complete break from the roots of the western classical tradition into a wholly new art form informed by the limitations of what they were leaving behind"

Wait, what? A whole lot of the western harmonic tradition went right into jazz. The "standards" are Tin Pan Alley songs from the first half of the 20th century. A lot of the bebop harmony came straight out of Debussy and Ravel. Third Stream music was an explicit synthesis of classical music and jazz. Some of Coltrane's innovations came out of Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Musical Patterns. The walking bass was in Baroque music (Bach). While you cannot neglect the African side of it (rhythm, the blues, improvisation) nor neglect that it was Black people who put together the pieces and created the music, saying that it was a "complete break from the roots of the western classical tradition" is farcical.

And it's a tradition, not a cargo cult. There are still people alive today who played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and so forth. I have played with some of them. They tell stories, give advice, and pass on things that you might not get otherwise. Before the advent of jazz programs in colleges, the music was passed on via an apprenticeship system, which is diminished but still extant.

Re: The Real Book

#98

Post by whimsicalism »

biggieshellz wrote: post #51
zimpenfish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same thing with Blue Bossa. The syncopation in the original is completely missing in the Real Book chart, and now every high school jazz musician learns it the Real Book way and runs it into the ground.

If you're just straight up reading from The Real Book and not listening to the records, you're playing yourself.

I was also lucky to have a piano teacher who would correct the wrong stuff in the real book for me.

Re: The Real Book

#99

Post by leetcrew »

cjaybo wrote: post #95
barrenko wrote: post #86

Since this is HN, any advice for someone wanting to get from basically zero music knowledge to reading and playing jazz stuff? Let's say keyboard or guitar. I do know some music theory from elementary / high school.

I've played both piano and guitar for over a decade, at what I'd consider to be a relatively advanced hobbyist level. I enjoy playing jazz, but I'm not so sure anyone would enjoy listening! For me, lots of theory concepts "click" more easily on the piano. I think it's partially a visual thing -- on a keyboard things like intervals are visually apparent (how many keys are between these two notes), whereas it requires…

I think you're probably right, but I do think guitar has one ease of use advantage over piano. scales and chords are "moveable" on guitar in a way they are not on piano. once you learn, say, the c major scale on guitar, you can just slide it up a fret and you have a c# major scale. same pattern and muscle memory. to do the same on piano, you have to actually keep track of what is sharp/flat in the scale. ideally you would develop a good understanding of the circle of fifths either way, but you don't necessarily have to on guitar.

maybe it makes no difference and I just feel this way because I've spent more time with guitars than pianos. when I sit down in front of a piano, I can't escape the feeling that it's biased towards c major.

Re: The Real Book

#100

Post by whimsicalism »

dhosek wrote: post #62

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.

I've had the exact same experience... There were a few early, illegal Real Books that had songs you couldn't get ahold of from the licensed versions.
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