I get that getting legal PDF fakebooks and an iPad is an initial expensive investment, but the irony here is many if not most of the good young players, like this bassist, are already spending multiple thousands of dollars on college, and you can get an accurate library of hundreds of standards and a reconditioned iPad for a few hundred dollars. After one tune I said "if you ever play this tune again there are some hits that are part of the form that you may want to know." His response was "I've never heard that tune before," which pretty much proves my point if you don't know a tune and you're trying to play it from a shitty chart you're going to fuck it up. Several times I said to him "I have the chart right here" and he ignored me. When that happened the bassist pulled them up on his phone, but I was right next to him with an iPad with PDF charts culled from the Chuck Sher New Real books and other vetted sources. There were a lot of the leader's original tunes and ones from other composers he had charts on, but he also called some standards. I was working with a bandleader for the first time and he had a young bassist - a very good player - who I'd only ever played with once before. Here's what happened on my gig last night: The tunes are crowd sourced and you get what you pay for. The collections of tunes in the the iReal are the same but worse there are so many bad changes in those that it's ridiculous, plus you have none of the other useful info like melodies, bass lines, rhythm section hits, and so on. That book was compiled by students at Berklee and that's why there were so many errors they didn't have the skills yet to transcribe the music accurately. I grew up when the Real Book filled this function, but I was warned early on by older musicians not to rely on it too much because of how many errors there were in it. Obviously it's a super handy app to have and there are times when it's a useful tool, but if you're using it as your default way of getting through gigs you're being a slacker. These days it seems like everyone uses the iReal Pro for basic charts on gigs.
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