Hi Dave and welcome to the forum! You're not in LA by any chance are you? I need an upright bassist for a gig in Santa Monica on November 24.

First, Book One is floating around the internet in Biab song format but I've not seen Book Two yet. Yes, since it contains the melodies, it's illegal. Shhhhh....

Second, by doing searches you can still find individual Biab jazz songs and could probably find all of them if you wanted to bad enough. BUT, you probably have those books already, no? Trust me it's faster to simply enter the chord chart yourself into Biab than spend hours trying to find it on the internet.

Listen to all the jazz demos on this website even though they use odd melodies you've never heard of, the chords will sound familiar. Why? Because they are actual Real Book songs but for copyright reasons PG has chosen to put a home made melody to Autumn Leaves for example. We actually had a little contest going here on the forum as to how many demo songs could we identify and I believe it wound up at 50 or so.

Now, I will diverge a bit here and say if all you want to do is practice the basic jazz pak may be enough. They all include some Real Drums swing and bossa's and a couple of piano and guitar tracks. That could be enough for you BUT the full boat gives you so much more to play around with you won't believe it so yeah, if you can afford it get the Ultra Pak. You won't believe how well some funk guitar can go with a classic swing tune for example then there's the much more modern smooth jazz stuff, it's really good. And the latin stuff, not just basic bossa's but serious latin including songo's, clave's, piano montuno's, etc.

And then, as a bassist wouldn't you like to see written out what some of the best players in the world did on a certain tune? A lot of the RT's have been transcribed into midi notation Real Charts including the bass parts. You could find those quite interesting. Matt btw did some of those transcriptions.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.