Creating my personalized book of more obscure charts

[cedar]

I own countless Real books and similar fake books of jazz tunes. Many are in digital form, but some are not. On top of that, I have reams of more obscure charts that I have picked up over the years.

 

I've been thinking about selecting my favorite, lesser-known (and less-called) tunes and putting them into one hard copy and digital book. As much as anything, this is just a way of making more accessible tunes that I currently have scattered all over the place.

 

In addition, I was thinking I would categorize the tunes in two ways: (1) some reference to the style or genre (i.e., ballad, latin, swing, blues, bebop); (2) some reference to whether the tune is particularly suitable for certain group configurations (i.e., solo, duet, trio, organ, etc.). That would allow me to use my book as a resource for jam sessions and jazz gigs.

 

For the digital copy, I want the table of contents to contain links directly to each tune.

 

My rough guess is that the number of tunes I am talking about is somewhere between 200-300, though I could see this growing over time. I will NOT be including incredibly familiar standards that make up the majority of the Real books; instead, this book would include the tunes that are generally not called at your typical jam session or hastily-thrown together jazz gig.

 

Any opinions about the best way to do this? My first inclination is just to use a spreadsheet program like Excel. I did some searching into the setlist software out there, but most seem geared to IOS or Android, and the tablet I use is Microsoft Surface. (Igigbook has a mobile version that I could run on my iphone, but I don't want to read on my phone and I'm not convinced that it would really save me time for this particular project).

 

And feel free to tell me that this exercise will be a gigantic waste of time.

[I-missRichardTee]

Not a criticism, but I am rapidly backing AWAY from lesser known jazz songs.. at least in the context of a working musician. A jam, is another issue, and pardon my sluggishness, if jams in fact are the thrust of this thread!

But for a working musician who deals closer to thousands, not hundreds, I too am wondering how can I only deal with each song title/ file ONCE, and never again deal with it.

To find the best solution for these many categories of songs.. genres, differing instrumentations, bandleaders, singers. It absorbs so much of my time.

I hope I am not far afield of your intention, but I have thought maybe Onsong and a 12 inch

iPad as a one step solution ( Actually there are more "steps" embedded )

 

Handwritten charts scanned then straight to OnSong

Sibelius or Finale wrought charts to OnSong

iReal Pro to Dropbox to OnSong

What have I overlooked?

 

[timwat]

1) Scan everything to PDF

2) MusicReader or similar Windows 8 PDF reader app that allows creation of custom index (and metatagging)

 

Whether that's a worthy use of your time...only you can address.

 

I'm not a Surface user - iPad Pro here, so iGigBook works fine for me. Not sure what's good on Win8 right now, MusicReader just came up in a quick google.

 

 

[cedar]

I forgot about MusicReader. I actually downloaded a trial version of that a couple of years ago, but something that I don't remember turned me off. I think it might have been somewhat cumbersome for me.

 

With regard to the purpose: I do think that my intentions may change. Initially, this is just so I have in one convenient places a group of tunes that are currently all over the place, with enough organization so that I can pull up a ballad, blues, whatever, on a moment's notice. Ultimately, I can see relying on the list for jam sessions and to create some set lists. But I am really just asking about the mechanics for doing this. I mentioned the purpose just so people would have an idea where I'm coming from.

[timwat]

Ah. Got it.

 

It seems to me converting everything to PDF is the best foundation - the format's not going away, and every OS has some set of apps to wrangle PDF collections.

 

From there, the question of what app, custom indices, sort by metatag, etc. will continue to evolve and change.

 

I believe having everything in one format, one place is always a good thing. Music gets repurposed and referred to at the most unexpected times and for the most unexpected purposes. I think having your collection in digital will pay dividends down the line you can't even anticipate.

 

Just my 0.02.

[aronnelson]

Use JotNot (or similar) for converting music to PDF easily and quickly (assuming you have an iPhone) Then use a program that will create a Table of contents and embed it into the PDF. Then use your PDF reader app to use the table of contents.

[cedar]

I have Adobe Pro. My impression was that creating a table of contents with links via a PDF program like Adobe might be more tedious than using Excel. But even if it's not, I assumed that Excel would give me more flexibility if I wanted to sort and arrange the music by certain categories.

 

Am I wrong?

[Markay]

Using Excel as database with links to the pdf file in a cell related to song name, composer and genre could work for 300 or 400 songs.

 

There are a number of free desktop based pdf utilities out there which can compile a pdf book from many pdf files. But like all freebies the smarts you want, like indexing etc. are often only available in the paid version.

 

Entirely doable, if it was a commercial venture it would be done in a database with on the fly pdf book creation.

 

 

[AnalogGuy1]

Using Excel as database with links to the pdf file in a cell related to song name, composer and genre could work for 300 or 400 songs.

I've done this for a collection in the low 1,000's; works fine on my Windows laptop. Perhaps there are other solutions in the Mac ecology.

[xKnuckles]

If you are hoping to sell them, my suggestion would be to make Bb & Eb versions of each song as well. Then they would appeal to horn players as well as lazy bandleaders like myself who are forever having to write things out for their horn players......

[cedar]

I have to admit that, though I initially was thinking along the line of 200-300 tunes that fell into the category of more obscure material which I or others were unlikely to have memorized.

 

But I do find myself tempted to keep expanding the list. It would be nice to have my entire collection of jazz tunes - or at least the entire collection of tunes that I would conceivably play at a jam or gig -- all digitized, sortable in numerous ways and easy to summon instantly. But that would surely amount to scanning thousands of individual titles. Maybe it's something I will stumble upon gradually.

 

 

[cedar]

Out of curiosity, I just did a search for digital versions of the Real books. As noted before, I have many old versions on PDF. The newer (legal) ones I tend to have in hard copy.

 

Sher indicates here - http://www.shermusic.com/new/0961470143-de.shtml - that you can get "The New Real Book Volume 1" in digital form, apparently with a table of contents that links to the tunes. Even though I own the hard copy, I wonder if buying the digital copy would save me some time on my immediate project. Specifically, I wonder whether I could somehow just import the tunes from that book [complete with indexed links] to my Excel document. Does this sound doable? If nothing else, it might be worth the $26 just to avoid the time of scanning the tunes (assuming that I could easily export the individual scanned pages).

[cedar]

I have one more technical question. As I mentioned, I have PDF's of many books and charts. Almost none of them have interactive tables of contents, with bookmarked pages.

 

I suppose one option would be to merge various PDFs into one document, then create bookmarked pages for every individual tune, linked to one table of contents.

 

My question is whether that process seems slower or more laborious than linking the same PDFs into an Excel document, which would have the benefit of being easy to sort according to different categories.

[timwat]

Here's the quickest path.

 

If you know any college or university profs, figure out a way to have the project farmed out to as a college internship, as a low-level database project.

 

Have them do the research on possible front-end solutions, develop a summary of pros and cons of each and a recommendation. And have them to the heavy lifting of PDF conversion, with your provided list of metatags implemented.

[cedar]

So here is where I'm at.

 

I have learned (through the Adobe people) how to merge my various digital files and create bookmarks to each page more or less automatically. Once that is done, I will have the task of renaming the bookmarks, alphabetizing and creating a linked table of contents.

 

I don't think this will be that tedious, especially since I can do this little by little. I don't think it will even be that difficult when I add the task of scanning those books I currently only have in hard copies.

 

But what I have not yet learned how to do - with Acrobat - is add some other information (principally brief descriptions of songs), so I can later sort as I please.

 

The "sorting issue" is not much of an issue if I keep this project relatively small (say 300 charts or less). But unsurprisingly, my goals seem to be shifting. Increasingly, I find myself thinking about the process of digitizing and alphabetizing virtually every chart I have (or at least those that I like). The idea of having an interactive table of contents, with all tunes alphabetized and easily accessible in ONE place, is really appealing.

 

But doing something of that scale really does require the ability to sort the tunes according to style and whatever else pleases me. I'd like to be able to create - with one or two clicks - lists of all my Latin tunes. And I'd like to be able to call up lists of tunes I would find appropriate for a solo or trio gig. The sorting options would be limited only by my imagination.

 

So, before putting this thread to bed, I'll just ask if anyone has any suggestions for methods/software to make this kind of sorting process -- now of a much larger quantity of material -- as painless as possible. I know I can sort easily with Excel. But I guess that would entail using two bits of software (Excel plus the PDF reader), which might be somewhat cumbersome at times. I could be wrong, but Adobe feels a little more natural for this kind of thing.

 

If this seems like a crazy project, I'll just point out that years ago I decided to digitize only my favorite vinyl, out-of-print records. Before I knew it, I was on the path to digitizing all 500 or so of my albums. So I do have a somewhat obsessive tendency sometimes.