Great video presentation work there, brudda.


The ACW works best with songs that:

*Have a straightforward accompaniment that includes full chords for almost every bar. The songs that use single note lines followed by shots such as in this Horace Silver tune can throw the Chord Wizard off the beaten path rather easily. It tries, but there may not be enough actual info there for it to identify the real base chord of measures like that.

*With songs that have a simplerk chord structure. Many jazz tune performances may be a tad too much for the ACW, which does work with the Pop, Folk, Country etc. genres - and even then with simple enough arrangements - but the Jazz genre, most especially, due to the use of chord extensions, walking bass lines, sparse arranging in parts where a full chord is implied rather than actually played note-for-note and as in this instance, the musicians playing "behind the beat" as is important to the jazz idiom can make for a chart like the one that you got here.

*Also consider that, by the time a player has developed to the point where jazz, modern jazz, bebop, abstract truth, etc. tunes are the goal, the ear should have developed past the deciphering of the chord structures for the simpler songs in life and so the ACW is not needed to do a complete chording identification. Not a copout, just tellin' it like it is given the present state of the algorithms involved. Some day we may just be pleasantly surprised with improvements to the thing that are bullet proof in that regard, meanwhile, "it am what it am".

All that said, I have found that for songs like this one, the ACW can make our song layout situation a bit more automated as at least it can get the right number of bars for a song and transfer that to the Chord Grid for us, saving that little bit of time, but then we will have to enter the correct chords via human intervention by highlighting each chord and typing in the right chordnames.

Purchase of fakebooks that have the chord transcriptions already done for you is a great way to get on with this kind of thing as you can then copy the chords from the fakebook directly into the bars already laid out by the ACW. The Realbook series of fakebooks for jazz is no longer an "under the counter" purchasing situation as a major publisher, (Hal Leonard IIRC) has purchased legal publishing rights for the RealBook series and you can now get them from various places such as Amazon dot com, etc. One can also purchase realbook charts as .pdf files on disk as well these days. Highly recommended for anyone working in the jazz covertune area.

Another way one might find correct chords for a jazz song without money expenditure is to use the web search engine of choice and see if someone hasn't already webpublished the chords for your tune somewhere. These can vary in quality, so you have to just wade through any you find and see if they are in the same key, follow the recording or not, etc. as some may be simplified, some may be just plain wrong yet others may be dead on correct.

Then there are the BiaB users around the web where you might find that someone has already created a BB file of that performance. These can represent a good starting point for cleanup and correction if nothing else, again a timesaver.

Finally there is the bottom line tried and true good old fashioned way of gettin' them thar chords: Transcribe, transcribe, transcribe, or, as my brother and I used to call it back in the day, "puttin' the needle back" - referring to how many times we may have had to sit there replaying one bar or part of one bar, instrument at the ready, until we successfully identified that chord and could move on to the next chord. Don't sell this drill short, as it may start out slow and seem to be agonizing, but it is one of those drills that increase your ability to hear the chords over time, meaning that the last song you transcribe will not take as long as the first one and on top of that, the ear training this method provides is simply invaluable for the aspiring improvisational musician.

Hope this helps you out and:

Straightahead,


--Mac

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