I’ve been using both. Fakebooks provide the melody, which is often right, and suggested chords, which are often just one guy’s opinion of what to play and which may be right, wrong, misnotated, incomplete, or just not what you or I would do in the same situation.
Piano arrangements are often much closer to the composer’s intentions. They’re never in tab. They frequently include the verse; fakebooks usually don’t.
Fakebooks give you a lot of elbow room and encourage you to think for yourself. Piano arrangements give you no elbow room. On the other hand, that may be because they put George Gershwin at your elbow.
None of this matters if you’re learning a song by Neil Young or Elvis Costello; arrangements play a much different role in their music that they do in Cole Porter’s or Hoagy Carmichael’s. It’s two different ways of thinking, reflecting different ideas of what’s important.
I’ve learned most of the old standards I know from fakebooks. It’s much easier to work through a tune, especially an unfamiliar one, if you only have chords and melody to worry about. For arranging, I like working from the piano scores, because there’s so much in them that I’d never find on guitar, regardless of how much noodling I do.
[TJH]
Comments