PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows ISO Collaboration Partner on a Western Swing Fakebook

Sony bought up the copyrights from the smaller publishers like Acuff & Rose. I'd like to invest some time into a product to "prove the concept" to a publisher. Absolutely! Who has time to make $3 profit from selling bootleg fakebooks on the internet?

I'm a sheet music junkie, with more songbooks and single song sheets, band scores, fake books than most music stores. I even have books about sheet music. I probably own a thousand songbooks and keep buying them. It's a sickness. It makes sense that one day I edit/compile a songbook and a Western Swing fakebook is the most marketable and practical idea I've got to work with. It would contradict my love of official songbooks if I didn't try to get it published. Are Alan Lomax and Milt Okun anyone else's heroes?

The Fred Sokolow Western swing and Bob Wills songbooks are P/V/G. I probably have 200 western swing songs in books or single sheets...so I already have the material but in the wrong format.

It's really two separate projects. 1) A paper Fakebook. 2) practice backing tracks.

The backing track part is the part that has no legal issues as long as the melody isn't in the music.

The fakebook can be created with any notation software but I'm trying to combine my effort and work within one interface and maybe have some practice tracks at the end of the day. I have a sample version of Pro Tools and the notation features for that was good but the rest was a disaster and I don't want to learn a completely different interface and then import the melody to Biab.

Are there major limitations with the Biab notation features that will prevent me?

Alan Lomax compiled a song/history book called "Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People" that is so accessible. All songs fit on a single page, melody with one verse and the rest of the lyrics in stanza form. Pete Seeger transcribed the tunes. A little anecdote by Woody Guthrie. It's a great fake book because it's really a musical tribute to an era by three legends of American music.

I entertain play piano at rehab/retirement homes and I've met several audience members here in Texas who saw Bob Wills live in 1941. One woman said, "We didn't think much of the Yankees at first, but boy could those sailors dance."

I also want to transcribe all the Guitar parts by the band Bread. It's annoyed me for years that Bread doesn't have an exclusive guitar tab book since their soft rock approach was so level-headed and popular. But Bread only has piano/vocal/guitar songbooks. I have 4 different Bread songbooks...Bread Complete, Bread Deluxe, Bread for easy guitar, Bread's greatest hits. It makes no sense that they don't have a guitar tab book. I'd like to rectify that but the reason I need all the songbooks is because it takes forever to transcribe recordings. One thing at a time.