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CREATING YOUR OWN MULTITRACK MIXING PRACTICE TRACKS | Jeff Hawley
When I started learning how to play jazz in junior high, there were two tools of the trade available: the Real Book and Jamey Aebersold records.
If you knew the secret password and the right music store, you could ask for the‘ fake book’ that was likely to be hidden under the counter, a compilation of jazz lead sheets written by hand and roughly bound from what I always imagined was a sea of blackmarket Xerox machines in the back alleys of some rundown major U. S. metropolis. Created in the mid 1970s, every aspiring jazz musician had a copy of these illegally produced( certainly not copyright-compliant) tomes with their classic cover emblazoned with the distinct hand-written title, The Real Book. Aside from a handful of questionable chord changes here and a typo here n’ there, they allowed for jazz performers to all play what was considered the classic jazz canon by simply calling out‘ Blue
Trane’ or‘ All of Me’ or‘ A Night in Tunisia’ in the same key and with the( roughly) correct melody and chords and form for everyone to navigate.
In order to really hone your craft during your‘ woodshed’ practice time, the go-to tool was a Jamey Aebersold record and accompanying book. Aebersold, a well-respected jazz saxophonist and educator, created a series of play-along‘ music minus one’ recordings of jazz standards without the melody— usually just a bass, drums, piano sort of backing track in various keys. One nifty aspect of these recordings is that you could often hard pan the mix to remove bass or piano, etc. and fill in that part yourself. Rather than the speakeasy sort of
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