I have song folios by the following artists

Hank Thompson
Grandpa Jones
Lefty Frizzell
Hank Snow
Hank Williams
Ernest Tubb
Little Jimmy Dickens
Bob Wills

That's approximately 80-100 songs and a good start on the founders of Western Swing. (Grandpa Jones is more bluegrass/folk)

The music is piano/vocal/guitar with chord symbols.
What I want to do is generate the lead sheet and lyrics page for each song. Right now each song is 2-5 pages long and I need to turn that into one or half a page like a Jazz Fakebook.

I bought a midi keyboard last week to facilitate the note entry for the melody and it seems to be working good after wading through some midi related glitches. But I'm far from comfortable with the BB software or the finer details of MIDI.

The goal is to have the lead sheet for all 80 songs, with lyrics, and a minus one backing track for each song. (A Karaoke file would be a bonus) At this rate my project will never be finished so I'm fishing for a partner who loves Western Swing circa 1945-1955 and who might have some sheet music to contribute or else has perfect pitch and can play the melody from memory. Or I'll scan the music and email it to you so you can work on it. It takes me forever to enter the correct notes from memory.

I've browsed for something similar and can say a western swing fakebook not only doesn't exist but it's something that ought to exist. It would sell as well as any Jazz fakebook. A few western swing tunes were covered by Ella Fitzgerald so they weren't totally ignored, but anyone who knows Western Swing knows it's pure swing Jazz in nature but the tempo was dance and the lyrics were folk and the artists all sang with a southern accent. Outside of the Texas it's not a well known genre.

I need a partner who has more experience with BB than me and who wants to see the western swing fake book complete. It's honestly the work of several people if not a team. But being copyrighted material it's not something I would invest a lot of money in before being sure it could be a commercial package. It's my personal project because I would use it as a performer and I know others who would use it. I've gigged with a jazz band who worked from a fakebook that didn't include one western swing song. How are we going to rehearse "Stay A Little Longer"? And I can't play any of these songs solo without a rhythm track.

I suspect it has commercial value for a publisher like Hal Leonard but I don't know why they haven't made it yet. I can see the cover now "Play along with your favorite Western Swing Artists" They have dozens of these "play along" songbook/cd packages but none for western swing. Even Jamey Aebersold has hundreds of play along books but none honor western swing. It should be a clue that Ernest Tubb and Lefty Frizzell were prolific songwriters and they have no songbooks in print. I'd like to change that starting with a western swing revival fakebook. If I had a partner I could collaborate with then it would save everyone else the trouble of answering my tech questions and it would also double the production. Or maybe someone else has tried this and determined I should use a Finale type software to notate, then export a midi melody and chord progression into Real Band...rather than notate everything in BB?

Is there an existing tutorial/thread on making fakebook notation and backing tracks? Making such a tutorial would be a parallel project since it's the main reason some people get BB to begin with. My experiments so far have given me hope that the software is capable of doing what I want (even if the notation features are a bit weak) but that I keep overlooking some feature or setting that causes chaos. I think I've made every possible mistake so far in synching a midi keyboard to a computer. I'm surprised I didn't break the internet.

Kind regards,
Oggy

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