I would like to make a "BotB Realbook" as a PDF entry for Decadent Decade 2. It would be pretty cool if anyone wishes to help out! Apologies in advance for the long post...


BACKGROUND
For those unfamiliar with the term, a "realbook" (or "fakebook") is a collection of lead sheets. A lead sheet is a simplified piece of sheet music that only shows the most important/recognizable parts of a song---typically just the melody and chord progression. Lead sheets are often used by jazz musicians at jam sessions, as a way to "fake" playing many different songs without having to fully learn and memorize each one. It's an important (albeit controversial) part of jazz history. More on wikipedia

I love lead sheets because they're compact and versatile. I don't have perfect pitch, nor do I practice regularly enough to have a super great musical memory, so whenever I want to just go play some songs for fun, lead sheets are a nice simple reference.

My favorite resource for lead sheets is vgleadsheets

. As of writing this, it contains 1339 video game songs. It's also a great example of what lead sheets look like outside the realm of purely jazz.


ENTRY IDEA
For a while I've had the idea of hosting PDF battles where you make a lead sheet of other BotB entries, but I never did because it felt too much like making a cover... But now it's Decadent Decade 2! I would like to make a bunch of lead sheets of BotB entries and assemble them into one giant PDF. I'm not sure how many pages we can fit into 12.5mb, but going off of the size of my 1554-page vgleadsheets pdf, I estimate we could have over 300 pages in 12.5mb. That should be plenty enough.


WAYS YOU CAN HELP
1. If you have any experience transcribing music (or would like to learn) I'd love for you to contribute! Even if there's just a single entry you want to make a lead sheet of, that's great. We've got 10 months so there's absolutely no rush. Feel free to reach out to me here or on discord (preston5626) if you are interested.

2. Let it be known if you have any songs you really want to see lead sheets of! There's a ton of amazing entries on BotB, so any small collection of those is bound to be a meager selection, but if there's any demand for specific entries then I'd like to prioritize those.

3. I have never hosted any sort of large collab before, so if you'd like to help refine this idea, I am all ears for any ideas or criticism.


OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
- For consistency's sake, it might be good to define what leadsheet symbols to use (ex. "Cmaj7" vs "CΔ7" vs "CM7"). We could also decide on what sheet music font to use (perhaps MuseJazz in Musescore) along with other guidelines for all participants to follow.

- Lead sheets should be somewhat peer-reviewed. Transcribing by ear is challenging so there are bound to be some errors.

- Any entries should be fair game, but I think it would be better to focus more on entries with greater significance. For example, you should probably choose a song that got some favorites and a tincan in a major battle over a song with a single favorite from a small XHB.

- If a lot of people are interested maybe it would be better too split it up into several entries instead of one oversized collab? idk

this wld b so fun.. the major has time tho, and i don't (currently)!! so maybe in a few months id like to come back to this n contribute some. i have not much music theory knowledge but i think my ears cld still be of use

i love this idea sooooo much and WILL contribute!

will learn how to read sheet music and transcribe solely for this now :trust:

cool idea! maybe its time i learn how to read sheet music

ive scoured my favorites and made a selection of tunes ill be transcribing:

pouale - radiant starbeam
lsdj all stars - yogt
tennisers - little lies
damifortune - outpour & remembrance
thingerthing - spoken story
haberchuck - nowhere i have to be
melonadeM - perpetual motion
remynfn - endless summer
arcane toaster - lunar loft
dboyd - sunfaded

i highly recommend going thru this process, its one of the few actual tangible things you can do to improve your composition skills.

To clarify, in the process of making a lead sheet for a song, we’d want to keep the melody as identical as possible rather than trying to add swing or something to make it “jazzy”? Wanna make sure I don’t go too far by remixing it and losing the idea of the original in the process of transcribing it.

Not sure I’ll have a ton of time to contribute to this immediately but I am definitely both experienced and interested, so count me in.

traditionally in jazz realbooks and in the vgm leadsheets i've seen the melodies are presented as is, you could add a bit of text stating "theme is played loosely with variations" or something similar when its warranted

funny as 'ell idea, I love it

@icrawfish like robotmeadows says, also usually there'll just be a phrase or adjective to try and capture the style; pretty often they're dumb and funny ('rock tango,' what the hell is that?) I guess around here you might say "keygen" and be understood as to what that sounds like, etc.

What I would bring up is that, with a lead sheet, you're trying to write down the minimum necessary things to get a tune across, and that can be different for various ones. Some music works fine as melody/chords, but if that doesn't put it across, or leaves out features that are totally core to the song, you might:
-Add another staff for an inner/counter line
-Write out the bassline (like in a funk tune;) if it loops then just write a bit and say so
-Write out whole chords in some cases to show a cool/unique movement
-Use rhythms in slashes for percussion or if there are hits with the melody

Another thing I guess I would throw out there is that nowadays we usually think of jazz combos when we hear "lead sheet," but that they've also been widely used in sessions, shows, soundtracks, old-time jams, country pickup bands, etc. so it definitely doesn't have to imply anything about style. Although those people all have slightly different ways of doing it, too

p.s. let's all write the chords as 3-note arps like 037, 058, etc. JK, I jest. Unless

love this idea. i've been thinking that i really ought to transcribe more in general, so i'm very down to contribute.

@Stupe as an individual who screams (internally) when i see chord names, that sounds like a beautiful idea

bonus idea: make it with #hexadecimal




tracker brainrot is so real

3-note arp notation would kill any chord that relies on more than 3 notes for it's chord quality 😭

I thought of another important consideration: Are we writing the melody for a C instrument?

Most real books as I recall have different versions such as "for C instruments", "for Bb instruments", "for Eb instruments", "for bass clef" etc so that any instrument in a jazz band could play the tune. Would we want to take each song that gets transcribed and make C, Bb, Eb, and Bass Clef versions of it to accomodate all those instruments? (realistically it shouldn't be terribly hard if you can go into whatever software and just change the key of the instrument...)

wow what a cool project! I'll try to contribute to this

If you really wanna make it tracker-brainrotted let's go ahead and write everything in sharps only >:)

@icrawfish
1. The melody should be transcribed as is. Maybe slightly simplified in some cases. Jazzification is done by the performers.
2. I forgot about transposed instruments! Perhaps we could do a Bb and Eb version as well for the horn players, but only submit the C one?


@Stupe
Totally agree with what you said about leadsheet writing! Basslines, rhythms, and styles are great to include when they play an important role. And I'm all for using style names like "keygen" and "digital fusion".

Another thing I meant to add is that some tunes will work better than others when it comes to making leadsheets. Tracks that aren't very melodic just don't make as much sense to transcribe in this way, as well as tracks that are very long and less repetitive. So just keep that in mind when you're selecting tunes.

I'll put together a musescore template and a guide for chord symbols to share here.

question: can we use any program for the engraving, or will musescore be preferred? i was interested in getting better at lilypond myself, but perhaps it could be better for consistency's sake if everyone used the same program?

love this idea and plan to contribute a song or two

@Couldn'tBeMe
The more I think about it the more I feel like any engraving software should be allowed. I wouldn't want to prevent anyone from joining if they dont like Musescore. Maybe I'll even allow handwritten lead sheets if someone wants to do that

if anything the slightly inconsistent formatting between songs from different software would probably be more authentic to a real book haha

(thinking) maybe this is taking too many liberties with the mechanics of decadent decade, though? since you can only refer to one original entry id, maybe it would make more sense for everyone to submit one sheet individually instead of compiling everything into one entry? but i guess a bunch of separate lead sheet entries wouldn't be very fun to vote on / make much sense to vote on. i guess it's probably best as originally proposed even if it doesn't exactly conform to the battle format?

also i don't use engraving software so i'd love to do a handwritten sheet! also would love to see other handwritten sheets, they're charming imo

When I first read this proposal I thought it was a great idea but outside of my skillset and therefore I’d probably pass. On second thought, however, it dawns on me that’s probably the very best reason to join in. Count me in for something!

@Jangler has the id referral thing stopped people from covering multiple entries in one before though? I was under the impression it was fairly common practice to do a mashup of multiple entries in the process of doing a cover, even if it doesn't happen too often (I guess I just contradicted myself huh... but I didn't think it was too unusual).

This is an awesome idea! I'll have a listen to some favourites and see if I can make some time to get involved in this!

This sounds like a lot of fun! I've just studied jazz for a year, and as part of learning new songs, we got encouraged to transcribe those that didn't have any musical notation, which I found a passion for and did a lot. _{(for private use only, our mentor was very keen about protecting the copyrights of the authors - he once gave us copies of musical notation which didn't have any public rights, and at the end of the lesson he made sure everyone of us fold our copies, rip them to dust and throw it in the trash bin xD)}

Just let me know where I can submit any, and I will provide transcribtions.

@icrawfish i believe mashups were specifically disallowed in the first decadent decade, see post #57440:

> As cool as the medley concept sounds; how about all BotBrs do the same thing by covering a single song per entry? :D/

the solution might be for everyone to submit pdf/musescore and that way you can fit two songs per account, and then we can compile them all in one download later

i feel like jangler's point still stands - it wouldn't be very interesting to vote on, like, potentially >100 charts separately, and it would be really hard to differentiate between them when voting too, as 'realbook-style-chart' is a pretty standardised/specific thing compared to traditional covers (not to say there isn't any variation, but yknow, who wants to vote on minor formatting differences?)

i also feel like in terms of usability/quality/cohesiveness it would be better if it was more of a collaborative project, with botbrs reviewing each other's work, helping each other out with transcribing, teaching each other about chord notation etc., as it sounded like prestune was originally picturing. and that's not to say that that couldn't happen while charts are still submitted individually, but my point here is that if that's what it looks like in practice then personally i would lean towards seeing it as one project/one big thing in some abstract sense (and thus one submission).

another minor point is that i also imagine charts might be a lot quicker to produce than covers in some cases (okay maybe not so much in the case of 'manually transcribing a long major submission', but in the instance of something like 'relatively short XHB winner tune where source midi can be imported into musescore'), so a lot of botbrs, particularly those with prior experience making charts, might want to contribute more than two charts.

that being said, if mashups are disallowed then i would see one large realbook as going against that. unsure if it was clarified anywhere if that's the case for this edition of decadent decade too. i also remember there was discussion in another thread about megacollabs potentially being against the spirit of majors/it being unfair for others having to compete against massive projects with individual submissions. i can't remember what the conclusion of that discussion was (if there was one) but that seems like a valid concern - it might feel pretty weird having to go up against a massive chart compilation with a single piece.

i don't think i'm the best person to say what's 'against the spirit of it' etc tbh and i'm not that bothered by the outcome, but this seemed like a cool project and just wanted to throw my thoughts out there!

@Jangler I see. I will be honest though, that sounds like it was a rule made up just because the entry id thing only had one slot, and that can easily be bypassed by just writing out the second entry link manually?

I just don’t see any logical reason outside of that to want to prohibit mashup entries. It usually encourages more creativity given what it takes to transition from one song to the next, and it’s not a “cheat code” to an instant win because a mashup of 5 good songs can still be done poorly. (One person mentioned that covering more users gets more people to be biased towards your entry, but I’d counter that it’s as useful as it is deadly; if you cover a lot of people’s entries at once, they may or may not enjoy your interpretation of it, which for some could lead to more passionately not voting high rather than passionately voting high just because their name is on it.)

(bit of a side tangent, but regarding what avoset said about mega-collab fairness: that is far from an issue exclusive to this one case, as there’s at least one instance per seasonal major of like 8 people coming together to do a gameboy collab of some kind if not something else as well, and I usually see that regarded positively as a fun collaborative experience rather than “they cheated cuz they had all those people working together!!!”. I see little difference here, even if the volume of people increases)

I’m not an admin or puke or anything so obviously I don’t have sway over these things. But I would strongly discourage restricting multi-entry covers just because of a single form field being coded straightforwardly. If there’s some other reason why it would be discouraged or disallowed please feel free to enlighten me, but as far as I can see from here it only serves to hinder the creativity of the masses.

In this Discord message

, puke suggested that entries covering multiple previous ones are fine:

kleeder: I was thinking about this one for example https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/The+Almighty+Beardieness/17998/

puke: is that strobe entry a cover of one track in the system and he just added a bunch more?

kleeder: yea he added the id of the first entry of his list and used a lot more

puke: yeah i think that's fine
i'm not gonna bother to do a one to many db table tho

However, it would be good to get some official confirmation on this, as it's the most frequently asked question next to "how does remix/photomash work?".

I made a discord server to help us keep track of this project!
https://discord.gg/rzXknd2H

1. admins/sysops discussed the multisongness issue: it seems to be ok, just link the additional referenced songs in the entry description

2. that discord link is "invalid" for me!

Oh shoot, sorry. I'm bad at discord. Here's a new invite link that should not expire:

https://discord.gg/qhQanxsNCj

i have the same issue with that link, actually!

in any case, right now i mainly have my eyes on:

gotoandplay - the healing process
bubblegumoctopus - tough guys' club (wish me luck)

i guess the downside to handwritten sheets is that decent quality ones will occupy more file space than softwared ones, but we can prob cross that bridge much later if we have to

Yeah I had a similar thought about file space of handwritten sheets. Once we get there I'll look into options for optimization and compression.

The invite link seems to be working for others, so it appears to be an issue on your side. Maybe try manually entering the invite link in Discord?