Fake book

A fake book is a collection of musical lead sheets intended to help a performer quickly learn new songs. Each
song in a fake book contains the melody line, basic chords
and sometimes lyrics - the minimal information needed
by a musician to make an impromptu arrangement of
a song, or fake it. The fake book is a central part of
the culture of playing music in public, especially in jazz,
where improvisation is particularly valued. Fake books
are not intended for novices: the reader must follow and
interpret the scant notation, and generally needs to have
thorough familiarity with chords and sheet music. Fake
books are often bound.

ten did not include the roots of the harmony. For example, a chord labeled Fdim (F diminished) for guitar
or ukelele might functionally be a G7b9 (G seven, at
nine) chord, which has a G as the root plus all the notes
of an Fdim7 chord. Thus, successfully using the Fake
Books required the expertise of jazz musicians and others trained in functional harmony in order to reinterpret
the chord symbols.
The three Fake Books were well indexed, alphabetically
as well as by musical genre and Broadway show. Interestingly, although the tunes in the Fake Books were compiled
illegally, the creators printed copyright information under
every song perhaps to give the false impression that the
Fake Books were legal.

History

The Modern Jazz Fake Book was divided into two sections, each indexed separately as Volume One and Volume
Two. The music was transcribed by hand from recordings, and each transcription included performer name,
record label, and catalog number. Unlike todays fake and
real books that have jazz in their titles, the Modern
Jazz Fake Book included no standards, but only original
tunes written and recorded by jazz musicians.

A predecessor to fake books was created in May 1942

when George Goodwin, a radio station director, released
the rst Tune-Dex cards. Printing on 3 x 5 (7.6 x 12.7
cm) index cards that were the same size as library catalog
cards, Goodwin provided lyrics, melody and chord symbols as well as copyright information.[1] Goodwin also
promoted the cards to professional musicians until 1963, All these books have been long out of print.
when poor health forced his retirement.
During the school year of 1974-75, an unidentied group
For many years the standard fake books were called of musicians based at the Berklee College of Music in
simply The Fake Books. All were composed of songs Boston published The Real Book, which claimed to x
illegally printed, with no royalties paid to the copyright all problems of poor design, although it was riddled with
owners. In 1964, the FBI's Cleveland, Ohio, oce ob- errors which were gradually corrected by generations of
served that practically every professional musician in the players. Steve Swallow, who was teaching at Berklee
country owns at least one of these fake music books as at that time, said the students who edited the book inthey constitute probably the single most useful document tended to make a book that contained a hipper reperavailable..[1]
toire, more contemporary repertoire.[1] Alongside the
The rst two volumes, Fake Book Volume 1 and Fake standard tunes of previous decades were lead sheets for
Book Volume 2, issued in the late 1940s1950s, together compositions by then-contemporary composers such as
comprised about 2000 songs dating from the turn of the Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Hen20th century through the late 1950s. In the 1950s the derson, Wayne Shorter, Carla Bley, Pat Metheny, Mike
Modern Jazz Fake Book, Volumes 1 and 2 was issued, and Gibbs, Ralph Towner and Steve Swallow (amongst othFake Book Volume 3, containing about 500 songs, came ers). It was extremely popular and in its turn spawned a
number of fake Real Books.
out in 1961.
The music in Fake Books 1, 2, and 3 was photocopied or Fake books originally infringed copyrights, and their cirreset with a musical typewriter from the melody lines of culation was primarily underground.
the original sheet music. Usually chord symbols, titles,
composer names, and lyrics were typewritten, but for a
number of songs these were all photocopied along with 2 See also
the melody line.
The chord changes in these books were notoriously inaccurate. Most of them were based on the guitar and ukelele
chords commonly found in earlier sheet music, which of-

Jazz standard
Ralph Patt, author of The Vanilla Book of 400 chord
1

4
progressions for jazz standards
Real Book
Rise Up Singing
The Fiddlers Fakebook
Chas. H. Hansen Music Corp., pioneer publisher of
legit fake books

External links
Fake Book song title look up tool
ChordSmith: Free Java program to create and transpose chords in fake sheets

References

[1] Kernfeld, Barry (2003). Pop Song Piracy, Fake Books,

and a Pre-history of Sampling (PDF). Kernfeld. Retrieved 2008-04-05.

REFERENCES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

5.1

Text

Fake book Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_book?oldid=672482158 Contributors: The Cunctator, Engelbach, Rbrwr, Paul
A, Stw, DavidWBrooks, Salsa Shark, Smack, Altenmann, Vikreykja, Ndorward, Fabiform, Migo~enwiki, Rich Farmbrough, Kbh3rd,
Jpgordon, Adambisset, Lemmie~enwiki, Kurivaim, Reisio, Jbaber, Puzzleman~enwiki, Imnotminkus, Gwernol, Funkendub, SmackBot,
Bugloaf, Stevage, Just plain Bill, Marcus Brute, ACzernek, Robosh, Eurodog, DabMachine, OnBeyondZebrax, Iridescent, Impy4ever,
Bobamnertiopsis, Kurtan~enwiki, MrFizyx, Mrgone78, My Flatley, Epbr123, Matthew Proctor, Lorenj, Responsible?, .anacondabot, Rydra Wong, Rmkeller, Jeamm, Sethkills, JavaManAz, JMa, Trivialist, Addbot, Tide rolls, Frehley, Yobot, KevinPerros, Gulfmonsoon,
FrescoBot, Kiefer.Wolfowitz, Electricmaster, ClueBot NG, Smtchahal, Justlettersandnumbers, Zak.estrada, Emayv, ChrisGualtieri, Epicgenius, BrazenOwl and Anonymous: 54

5.2

Images

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'A'_(PSF).png Original artist: 'A'_(PSF).png: Pearson Scott Foresman
File:Edit-clear.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Edit-clear.svg License: Public domain Contributors: The
Tango! Desktop Project. Original artist:
The people from the Tango! project. And according to the meta-data in the le, specically: Andreas Nilsson, and Jakub Steiner (although
minimally).
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5.3

Content license

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