The melody hints at what chords to play and you start to rely less on the handicap of the charts and just follow your ear. After some time the movement of the chords makes sense in a way that transcends a particular piece. Why? Because there really are only a few meaningful sets of changes and you start to see why when you study music theory. Studying music theory and how chords move in a progression. Like I said Real Book has worked well for me but they are all similar in look a feel.Ī better idea is to devote some time to the following, if you haven't already However, if your goal is to have a quick reference to a large library of tunes to pull out and play at a low key gig then any of these are great resources. For a guitarist this doesn't give much to work with. I own a "World's Greatest Fake Book" and it is anything but that! The printing quality is better than the Real Book, but they crammed 1000's of tunes into it, small font, and the chords are mostly Maj and Min, not a lot of extended chords. They were a quarter of the price as a published Fake Book and i.m.o., and despite my previous comment, had descent changes. Despite that I think the Real books are the best value for the money (but I got my first one in the late 70's early 80's when they were probably bootleg). ![]() As dmb pointed out, there are "errors" in the Real Book, both in melodies and chords. For a guitarist this would amount to playing a constant barrage of Freddie straight 4 (ii-V7)'s in the circle of 5ths all day long. You cannot really learn Jazz from the real book. If you want to really learn Jazz, or any style of music you need to immerse yourself in that music, and the culture of that music. This depends on what you are trying to achieve. Are there others worth picking up, including Real Book Vols 2 and 3 or any good online fake books? Or maybe other standards collections would be diminishing returns at this point, and I should focus on musician or style-specific books?" "I'm going to fix that soon by getting another book or three, but I'm not sure whether there are other comprehensive jazz chart anthologies that can stack up. They are like cliff notes and you would not pass an exam (or at least do poorly) having read only cliff notes. These books are meant to help working musicians get a quick peak at the basic structure of a tune. W/r to Real books and anthologies in general you will never get great arrangements. "The only jazz standards book I own is the cliched Real Book 6th Edition Vol 1."Īlso, with a bounty on this question I think it should be less broad and more specific but that's just my opinion. Real Book Vol 2 is a good option for American Songbook charts, but I'm also curious about suggestions that may focus on other specific styles. Since this question may be phrased too broadly, my specific goals are learning about other similar big collections of basic charts for canonical jazz/jazzblues-etc related standards, to flip through and practice low-prep shedding when given only the melody/chords. (I tried to keep this broad enough so that answers will be useful to everyone, but in case mentioning specific players/styles would be constructive how about these: Monk, Miles, Duke, ragtime/stride, bebop, hard bop, fusion.) Are there others worth picking up, including Real Book Vols 2 and 3 or any good online fake books? Or maybe other standards collections would be diminishing returns at this point, and I should focus on musician or style-specific books? I'm going to fix that soon by getting another book or three, but I'm not sure whether there are other comprehensive jazz chart anthologies that can stack up. ![]() The only jazz standards book I own is the cliched Real Book 6th Edition Vol 1.
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