The Song Fight Bulletin Board

For my guitar tab/chord needs, http://www.guitartabs.cc usually suits me just fine. Minimal ads, reasonable accuracy, tolerable variety of tabs.

But I want more. I want lead sheets. I want a super-giant online fakebook.

Cole Porter, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, other standards, everything. I want it online, and for free, goddamnit.

So:

A: where do you guys get your tabs and charts when you need them?

and B: Does a super-dooper online fakebook exist?

I was trying to get a couple of Chilli Peppers numbers down last night. My usual place is Harmony Central.

http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/tab.html

But just googling around gave me lots of tabs as well. I think that huge fake book thing that you are looking for is out there, but you might have to pay a subscription.

Sober, just figure them out, man. It's great practice. I've found that the time and effort it takes to track down a chart in a store or even online >= the time it takes to sit at the instrument of choice and poke around till you get it. Plus you learn a lot more that way.

Q: How many songfighters does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Man, you don't need to change that lightbulb.

the sober irishman wrote: A: where do you guys get your tabs and charts when you need them?

Sorry to say I carry a beat-up "Real Book" for vocalists (a goldmine of lyrics!) for my standards. I've never found a better resource.

As a college student, I felt the pain of shelling out $50 for that lump of photocopy. I wish I could reach back in time and assure myself that it ends up being the most valuable book I bought in college.

I have to go with Jim on figuring them out yourself except for two things: 1) I have a pretty good ear, and even so I miss some of the subtleties that make the transcription ring true, and 2) it takes time. So if you want to get it right, right now, I suggest raising your budget from zero to... I don't know... phantom?

Jim: I know the virtue of playing stuff out by ear. That's how I play, actually. The thing is, I have pretty good ear-hand coordination, but I want to work on my eye-hand coordination. If a song is playing, I can generally play right with it by the second listen, but I want to get better at reading charts and playing/singing along with them. I can't sight-read for shit.

Also, with listening, I'm bound to miss shit. It's pretty easy to mistake a V7 for a ii, depending on the context.

Most of the players at the jazz club where I work will let me make copies of their charts, which is cool. Listening to cool renditions of all these standards all day is really what has interested me in this.

Ah, yeah, that's a good reason to get a fake book. My sight-reading is also horrible. Horrible.

I would never mistake a V7 for a ii. But you mentioned Ellington above, and sometimes with songs like his, not even the written chart will make it sound right. Sometimes the voicings have to be *just so* to give it that flavor. But fake book charts are notoriously inaccurate, so just cuz it's written down doesn't mean that your own figured-out chord wouldn't be better anyway.

Has anyone else had this experience?: There's some song with a chord change in it that's really mysterious, and you can't figure it out, and it lives in your mind as this magical, mysterious chord beyond human reckoning, then one day you either run across a printed chart or else you stumble across the right chord, and as soon as you learn what that mysterious chord is, all the magic deflates out of it, like "Oh, is THAT all that was? Big deal." and then you realize it was better not knowing what the chord was at all.

Anytime I can't figure out a chord, and then I find a chart which tells me what chord to play, I feel better than when I didn't know what chord to play.

15-16 puzzle wrote:Anytime I can't figure out a chord, and then I find a chart which tells me what chord to play, I feel better than when I didn't know what chord to play.

This most often happens with your own songs, right?

[things of that nature]

I made one for you:

It's called "last date"

A#BbDmFmASdfgjnaldkjvhlkasjflkjagaj :||

All that, played at 200bpm, each chord played at eighth-note rythym.

[other stuff]

the sober irishman wrote:It's pretty easy to mistake a V7 for a ii, depending on the context.

It doesn't matter, then.

j$

I didn't even listen to the song. I just randomly picked a title you'd done, and assumed it contained more chords than you have teeth. :/

This is a bit off topic, but NutChord is a great utility application for finding and translating fingerings for guitar and voicings for piano, if it's still around. Too lazy to google.

[stuff that was bad]

Did you guys bother to read the faq for this forum? Did you just ignore the many times I've asked people to flame each other via PM? Or are you having this little jerk-fest with the sole intent to piss me off?

It's been a pretty bad weekend for me, guess I should know better than to try to relax by checking out my favorite Internet community.

Jim of Seattle wrote:...as soon as you learn what that mysterious chord is, all the magic deflates out of it, like "Oh, is THAT all that was? Big deal." and then you realize it was better not knowing what the chord was at all.

Yes! Like remembering a dream and realizing it isn't as cool as you thought it was before you remembered this.

This happens to me with rhythm and meter occasionally, too. The first month or so after I'd first heard Yaz's "In My Room" (from "Upstairs at Eric's"), I thought it was the most brilliant rhythmic scheme and talked it up to all my friends. Then I realized I'd placed the downbeat on the wrong note, and once I had realized that, it sounded so...banal. And my friends thought I was loony.

More often, though, I'll think I know what the chord is, and it seems typical. But when I find a chart, it has some crazy thing instead that actually sounds more like the real song. This happens mostly with augmented chords---either I don't hear them right, or I never think to try them. So I usually side with a written chart. Unless I find it on the 'net. I don't trust 'net transcriptions one lick.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned http://www.olga.net/
That's where I usually go to find stuff. But I only ever want chord sheets, 'cause I haven't figured out anything more complex than strumming.