I've searched the PG Website and the forum, but I couldn't find any information about which specific songs are contained in the BiaB Midi Fakebooks. Do such lists exist somewhere?

I would imagine someone may have compiled a list. I just use the song picker and have the songs sorted by folder so they are easy to find, you can then look at all the songs in these folders and see what is there.

Probably not the answer you were looking for?

Hi etcjoe,

I don't have these packs, and therefore they will not appear in my song picker. I'd just like to know if they are worth considering to buy them - don't want to buy a black-box.

Self-serving plug:

I have 45 fake e-disks for Band-in-a-Box here http://www.nortonmusic.com/contents.html#fake

Each fake e-disk page has a complete song list on it, and one or more free samples.

They don't compete with or duplicate PG's products, but compliment them and extend the usefulness of Band-in-a-Box.

Notes ♫

Hey Notes,

thanks for the link! I've already read somewhere about these books, but didn't have a link yet resp. haven't managed to search for it yet. What I've also read before is that they are without melodies and lyrics and therefore don't violate copyrights. Can you confirm that?

I know that Norton Music states all their FakeDisks do not have Melody nor lyrics.

Thanks Matt!

Legal midis with chords but no melodies and no lyrics are definately better than illegal midis with chords and melodies and lyrics, and therefore I'm looking forward to check out that stuff.

However, even better would still be legal midis with chords and melodies and lyrics, for sure! I think that many people would pay the appropriate price for that, but it seems like sheet music publishers unfortunately don't agree on my estimate yet.

You are correct. No melodies or lyrics. Some of the copyright holders refused, others wanted to charge up to $2.50 per song.

So the compromise I made was to make fake disks with off-the-shelf music books. That way you can open the BiaB file, open the page in the book with the melody, click "play" and play along with the track by reading the melody line in the book.

I put a link to the book in the same page as my fake e-disk. The link is to Amazon, but you can also get the book elsewhere.

Notes ♫

Notes,

I just bought a Fakebook-Disk and a Style-Disk at your shop. Looking forward to check them out in action.

Anyway, I would even be happy to pay 2.50 more per song, if I then (legally) wouldn't have to sightread the melody or to type the melody into a music app in order to learn it much better and much quicker (since I could then also hear the sound and could visualize the melody in Synthesia and the like).

So I'm just hoping that someone will offer legal complete (chords & melody & lyrics) Midi Editions of Fakebooks as well as of Easy Fakebooks resp. Books in the Style of HL's E-Z Play Today Series one day not too far in the future.

I own a couple of printed Fakebooks btw, but I have decided that I don't want to buy any more of them, since I simply use them too seldomly as print editions.

I don't see that you ever get your original question answered.

haha - you're right. I think that means that such lists don't exist :-)

Hi, I found some lists on my PC. Classical 1 and 3. Try to append it. No warranty. Is this the kind of List you are looking for?
Regards Wolfgang

Here's the Scots part....

Hey Wolfgang,

oh great, I think that's indeed what I was looking for!

This is the URL with the PG-Fakebooks listed, but unfortunately no Songlists included there:
https://www.pgmusic.com/addons.fakebooks.php?os=win

Thanks a lot, Wolfgang!!

You can buy midi tracks, that are legal on the web. midi-hits.com, and others exist with very professional arrangements, most sounding just like the original song they reference the artists with the songs so you know what version you are getting if there are more than one. Typically $7.99 and $8.99 USD each with discounts for quantities, instantly downloadable. I have a few of these and they are quite good.

Hi etcjoe,

yeah, I have a lot of them, all legally bought from those shops over the years, and most of them are definately of a great quality. I usually display them with Synthesia (and sometimes I also import them into BiaB), and that works very well.
It's simply another approach to songs than with Fakebooks, so I'd just like to have the choice between both approaches, as far as possible.
Also that would make a musician more flexible in regard to band setlists (sometimes bands choose from Fakebooks, sometimes from recordings).

At $2.50 per song,

• the Broadway Disk (#29) would cost $2,050.00 in royalties alone, before charging for our work.
• The Country Disk (#13) would cost $1,750.00,
• my best-selling Jazz disk (#5) would cost $1,562.50,
• and the disk that goes with The Real Book (#37) would be $1,000.00
• plus the charge for our work, our overhead and the silent partners (shopping cart, Visa/MC merchant's account, authorization company, bank, etc.)

I don't think I'd sell many e-disks at that price.

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

Notes,

people pay 5$ per song (or even up to 10$ per song) - ok, that's for fully transcribed midis - at shops like Hit Trax, Geerdes or Midi-Hits. Sure, nobody would then buy a big package of 800 songs, but I don't think that they would buy only 3 songs and then never come back, and they would probably still buy your no-melody-bigpack-books, too.

So why not getting the license for just a couple of Realbook songs, just to try out how the customers would adopt that offer.
And what about songs at all, where the copyright protection period is already exceeded? That must be the case for be a couple of Vaudeville songs, for example.

You could offer a Fakebook and an Easy-Fakebook (= quantity and quality of chords reduced/simplified as much as possible) version of those in BiaB format, and already attached to a BiaB style.

Well, these are just suggestions for sure - but however, that's at least what I'm mainly looking for at the moment :-)

Unfortunately, you can find any number of illegal midi files on the internet. Thousands of them in fact. I don't condone it. If I need a midi file that sounds like the original artist with all the bells and whistles, and since I can't play most of those instruments, I purchase a legal midi from one of the afore mentioned vendors. I also own a great number of Mr. Notes Norton's styles, fakebooks, as well as the books they are based on. they usually do the job or at least get you close enough for a great start.

Yes at quantity those are quite expensive. Most of the midi shops charge from 5.99 to 8.99 and even more for a single song. midi-hits will make a custom track for you for $99!!! So it is expensive way to go. I don't think anyone would want you to do these whole books and really the individual tracks are all already covered by these other vendors so you would be competing with them and they are already entrenched.

If I were to sell individual songs, I'd make MIDI sequences. BiaB tracks are more generic than the tracks the sequence sellers make.

However, it's more economical to do that out of the USA.

In the 1990s when I was interested, I checked it out. In the USA, the seller has to pay for thousands of copies in advance, whether he/she ends up selling them or not. In most other countries, they pay the royalties as they sell them.

That may have changed since then, but I spend so much time in the BiaB aftermarket products, I don't have time to compile a big catalog of individual sequences.

Currently, Mrs. Notes and I are working on 2 new style disks and 5 new fake disks. We hope to have a release next year.

It takes thousands of hours to do this and do it to the point where we are proud of our work. We haven't even watched TV since 1990. Instead, we work on music. I'm not complaining, we like it that way.

Notes ♫

Hey Notes!

Ahh - I understand much better now! Thanks for your explanation!

Can you give a hint as to which fake disks? I am always in the market!

A huge Praise & Worship disk, a few in the Real Book Series and a Rock disk.

Style disks will be Country and Rock.

Of course, that will depend on how the fake disks turn out, and how soon the subcontractors we hire to pick the styles get them back.

I do not pick the styles for our fake disks. If we did, we would probably favor the Norton Music styles, because I know them the best, and that wouldn't be fair to the customer.

I tell the subcontractors to pick the best style for the song from all the PG and Norton styles available. I also say if a PG and a Norton style work equally well, pick the PG style, as our customers are more likely to have the PG style.

When the books come back, Mrs. Notes and I go through them together in real time, listening and checking every song, one at a time(we call it studio karaoke). We want to make sure that there are no typos (like a Cm for a Gm), the arrangement works, if a chord needs to be altered a bit to work, or anything else. Sometimes there are more chords in a measure than PG allows, and there isn't an appropriate EXPANDED style for the song, so we make our best guess as to which ones to include and which ones to exclude, but we try all the combinations anyway. Most of the time our first guess works, but sometimes it surprises us. On rare occasions, we will decide to use a style that is different from the one chosen. We want to make the disks as good as we can, after all, our name is on them.

Of course, the styles chosen by the subcontractor are only a suggestion. So many songs have been done in so many ways, sometimes picking one is hard. And if you don't like the style chosen, it's easy to change it.

Sometimes we have spent thousands of hours on a book, and found it wasn't good enough to have our name on the disk, so it never gets released. Actually it gets put in a limbo folder, hoping enough good styles will come along to revive the project.

Notes ♫

PS we are dong a Latin American fake disk too.

The Norton disks are top notch. I bought the Realbooks and New Realbooks a long time ago and they are very well made. The Nortons know Band in a box so well, that you get all the complicated structures (think: Three Views of a Secret, Jaco Pastorius’ masterpiece in the New Realbook) and they work perfectly.

Sher music and other publishing companies should team up with Nortonmusic to get the melodies in there as well.

And… as I keep repeating, Pgmusic should step up their game so biab plays the chords correctly. Yeah, I’ve been saying it since the chord list got really long: 2001, if I recall correctly, and I’ll keep saying it. The Nortons have put in all the wonderful Bill Evans reharmonizations, but Band in a Box can’t play them properly.

[/quote]
A huge Praise & Worship disk, a few in the Real Book Series and a Rock disk.

Style disks will be Country and Rock.

[/quote]

Thanks for the update. I find your work to be exceptional and the styles chosen are usually right on as well. Thanks again.

Thanks for your kind words.

Notes ♫