What is Fake book?

Altough I like JustinTabs, I am a person who wants to own things. There is sheetmusicdirect where you can buy songs in PDF. I found fake book and there a few books with 100 songs or more. I want to know how this book is and if the chords are correct?

1 Like

Correctness depends on the level of review before publishing.

Do you have experience with books like that?

Check out this lesson:

Cheers,

Keith

2 Likes

Thank you .
But the fake book is not just jazz.
Or am I wrong?

A fake book can be any type of music, but they are probably most common in Jazz music and are very commonly used by Jazz musicians.

Cheers,

Keith

The fake book

And there are a lot,

Greetings

1 Like

I will buy one. It would be great when you can buy it in pdf format and than print it. On Sheet music direct you can buy them but almost 5 euros for one song is too expensive.

Note that lead sheets, as found in fake books, are not the same as tab or normal notation sheet music.

Cheers,

Keith

Can you recomend me a a book with tabs and chords? The 5 euros for one song has everything but as I saud too expensive

Fake books are good to have, and pretty accurate for the most part.
When one get better at playing songs and melody, then I find that I start changing the chords in the book to suit my style.
Keep on playing, and have fun.
Lyrics with chords, are great vehicles to keep playing as many styles and genre as possible.
Respectfully,
Rene

There are so many. Have you looked at Justin’s books? Mostly cord and lyrics, some score/tab for specific part when needed. He selections are well curated for the courses.

2 Likes

Yes I have 3 Justin songbooks. Both beginner songbooks and acoustic songbook. At the beginning I needed the chords over the lyrics and I could not play them from the beginning to the end because of that. I never had a look in it again. But I think I missed the point why he did that.

I also bought two beginners and acoustic (and note reading). But they didn’t prove useful yet, so I treat them as “additional support for Justin’s great initiative”

1 Like

I will use them today for practicing songs.

There’s dozens, if not hundreds of these available at both specialist music shops as well as places like Amazon. If you need tabs, you need to search for tab songbooks or music books for guitar or similar phrases.

For example, search Amazon for “Play Guitar With” and you will get a bunch of artist and genre-specific song books.

Note that some of these will be “easy guitar” versions, meaning they will be versions for beginners using simple chords. These are designed to be easily playable, rather than highly accurate to the original song.

Others will be fully transcribed pieces including pages of complex solos.

Cheers,

Keith

1 Like

But a few are easy to play and are accurate. I will have a look today.
To bad UG is not that accurate because you can print official tabs.

Hi Roland,
I’m probably missing something again, but why not go with Justin’s beginner songbooks? they are in your house, I think you are looking too far…correct me if i am wrong
Greetings,Rogier

1 Like

That’s mostly a function of the song: harder songs are more difficult to play.

Some books offer an alternative “easy guitar” version of these harder songs. By definition, they are not 100% accurate compared to the original song (assuming we are talking about covers of popular songs here) but are designed to allow a less capable player to play a “good enough” version.

Justin tends to offer both “easy” versions and more accurate versions, depending on the song. “Wish You Were Here” is an example of where he has done that.

Of course, these books are normally “accurate enough” in that they are usually higher quality than many of the tabs out there on the Internet. But they might (as an example) indicate a standard G chord instead of a G7, or a Gsus4, etc.

The quality is variable because they are put together and submitted by volunteers. I have actually had a fair bit of success with UG Tabs, although it sometimes requires a bit of searching through versions.

Where there are big discrepancies in the chords, I find it’s usually because either the transcription is in a different key from the original song (or the version I was expecting) or they have dumbed-down the chords too much (which is similar to the “easy guitar” books).

I find the biggest discrepancies are usually in things like the time signatures or the solo transcription.

For example, I have a Guitar Pro file for a song I downloaded from UG which has been transcribed in 4/4, but it should have been transcribed in 6/8, and there is no easy way I can find to transform it to the right time signature. The result is that some of the solo parts don’t work properly (they even show up as an error in Guitar Pro).

Part of the problem is that many of the versions are also derivative of other versions, so one person will upload a version and others will take that version and “improve” it. That often results in better versions, but it sometimes doesn’t, especially if they are building from a faulty baseline like an incorrect time signature.

But if you are discerning, you can often find a good version.

In my experience, the “official” tabs are generally pretty good quality.

What I tend to do is bring a version into Guitar Pro and then tweak it.

Cheers,

Keith

Yes, the officials are pretty good.
Thank you for your help