The Real Book • Hacker News Board

Re: The Real Book

#81

Post by skybrian » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #71

This is the problem with modern jazz. Treating it as some kind of canon is the antithesis of what it was in the first place. It's tantamount to writing down a conversation between two ancient philosophers and repeating it ad nauseum, expecting some new insight. Keith Jarett wasn't concerned with the stuff Art Tatum had done. Miles Davis wasn't trying to build on Louis Armstrong's rendition of Wonderful World . They w…

Sheesh, it sounds like you are overly obsessed with being cool.

Learning songs written by other people is something every musician does. There's nothing wrong with playing covers and being able to play music that's familiar to your audience is essential for many working musicians.

That doesn't mean you have to play old standards when you could riff on newer music, but it also doesn't mean you can't. There's nothing wrong with reviving a tune written a long time ago and putting your own take on it.

Music is not necessarily more enjoyable just because it's brand new. It can be just as interesting if it's new to you, and there's plenty to explore.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: The Real Book

#82

Post by fortran77 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

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.

The software that helps is the ability to play and replay any part of the track, or slow things down a bit. The "transcription" is usually done by someone who knows music...

Re: The Real Book

#83

Post by dcist » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

p_j_w wrote: post #72

aphextron wrote: post #71

This is the problem with modern jazz. Treating it as some kind of canon is the antithesis of what it was in the first place. It's tantamount to writing down a conversation between two ancient philosophers and repeating it ad nauseum, expecting some new insight. Keith Jarett wasn't concerned with the stuff Art Tatum had done. Miles Davis wasn't trying to build on Louis Armstrong's rendition of Wonderful World . They w…

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.

It's a mix of both. Musicians often want to seem like they didn't take lessons and don't have in-depth knowledge of music theory and old songs, but they often do (e.g., how many guitarists don't admit they took lessons and want to make it seem like they're just riffing but they mysteriously seem to hit the chord tones on the changes and manage to play in modes that work for a song). It's just not "cool" for a musician to be knowledgeable about music theory and history. I think every pursuit - not just music - is presented with a challenge once it's been around for a while, it's no longer new and unusual, and there exists a body of knowledge and history. It becomes a large task to learn from past performers and then try to innovate in your own way. Once a body of knowledge becomes large enough, it's a big life-consuming task just to get your head about the prior body of knowledge before you're able to go out on your own and attempt to innovate. I think the same thing is happening with rock. The same could be said for philosophy itself - philosophy used to be practical and applicable to everyday people (see Greeks and Stoics, for example). Now, it's largely confined to academia and extremely esoteric arguments among a cloistered elite.

Re: The Real Book

#84

Post by cossatot » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

tempodox wrote: post #75

aphextron wrote: post #71

This is the problem with modern jazz. Treating it as some kind of canon is the antithesis of what it was in the first place. It's tantamount to writing down a conversation between two ancient philosophers and repeating it ad nauseum, expecting some new insight. Keith Jarett wasn't concerned with the stuff Art Tatum had done. Miles Davis wasn't trying to build on Louis Armstrong's rendition of Wonderful World . They w…

But isn't that how it always goes? Things that were once avant-garde become “standard” and the next avant-garde has to be something different again. The same thing cannot stay avant-garde forever.

Back in the days when I was a teenager

Before I had status and before I had a pager

You could find the Abstract listenin' to hip-hop

My pops used to say, it reminded him of Bebop

I said, "Well, Daddy, don't you know that things go in cycles?

Way that Bobby Brown is just amping like Michael"

-- Q-Tip, A Tribe Called Quest, Excursions

Re: The Real Book

#85

Post by hoprocker » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

The Real Book, often considered the Real Inaccurate Book.

Re: The Real Book

#86

Post by barrenko » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

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.

Re: The Real Book

#87

Post by Slow_Hand » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

flycaliguy wrote: post #10

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?

Attack Magazine has a section called Beat Dissected which teaches sub-genre beat making. https://www.attackmagazine.com/technique/beat-dissected/

Will second. This is about as granular and well put-together as I’ve seen for teaching electronic beat-making.

It’s sometimes hard to do this because oftentimes in electronic music the sound or technique can rely on a quirk of the specific synth or sample. Attack do a great job considering.

Re: The Real Book

#88

Post by sixstringtheory » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

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!

> 2900 classical guitar tabs in plain text format

> Use a maximum of 80 characters a line so that the tab prints out ok

> An 9MB downloadable zip file is available of the whole site

The fact that I had an upwelling of joy reading those lines on a nice, plain webpage just goes to show how far we go to lock down and bloat up so many things these days. Thanks for linking! The scrolling versions of the tabs are neat as well.

> do NOT use the 'Tab' character for spacing

I had no idea the "tabs vs spaces" debate raged in other corners of the universe...

Re: The Real Book

#89

Post by kaoD » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

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.

Go back to the fundamentals first. https://www.musictheory.net/lessons Learn this by heart then learn it again!

Best lessons ever for Music Notation and Music Theory 101. Just keep in mind this is for the "western common-practice period", not some kind of intrinsic property of music.

Then watch a lot of Adam Neely, learn on https://www.justinguitar.com/ if you play guitar, and just devote lots of hours to the many, many, many free resources on the internet (which now you will be able to search for, since you will start to know the unknown unknowns).

See you in a few years, the self-taught way is long but rewarding. Have fun!

EDIT: Also, remember learning both horizontally (theory) and vertically (play the damn tunes!) It's easy to fall into the unidimensional growth trap.

Re: The Real Book

#90

Post by stereoabuse » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

I had no idea this history! My Bb copy for trumpet must have been from the first year of legitimate production. Always enjoyed reading this handmade comic-sans-y notation and have fond memories of my high school trio playing extended version of Red Clay.