I think the chords for Summertime could be improved

[captbaritone]

I think the chords for the Gershwin tune Summertime could be improved. However, I know this is might be a tricky issue as harmonizations are ultimately a matter of preference. In this particular case the chords would change about twice a measure and I think the new chords would be an obvious improvement.

What is your policy for things like this? Are you interested in pull requests refining and improving harmonizations? I don't want to step on your toes.

Thanks for all your work on this project. As you can probably tell I've become very excited about it and am eager to help. I hope my flood of pull requests has not overwhelmed you.

[veltzer]

No problem about the flood - it is welcome.

Put in another version of the tune with your harmonization. If a tune will have two versions the builder of the book would be able to choose between the versions when building the book (in the future build system that is, not now).

For an example of a tune with two versions see "There will never be another you"....

[veltzer]

The book is getting bigger, I like it. My dream is to make this the best jazz real/fake book around... (with most tunes and having a customizable look and feel - and then connecting writing some iphone/android app to help people find individual tunes when they rehearse instead of just looking at the entire book as one pdf (help them in building performance lists etc)...

OK. time to stop dreaming.

[captbaritone]

I love your dream, and I thought I would share why I became obsessed with this project as soon as I discovered it.

It was a ratty old fake book that taught me to love jazz and allowed me to teach myself how to play piano. That book, and every subsequent book, were full of errors and were missing, what I thought were, great tunes. That's just the nature of a book that covers so much material, especially an unlicensed one. I would dutifully write in my corrections, but it bothered me that musicians everywhere were making these corrections in parallel and not benefitting from each-other's work.

So, my dream starts as a fake book where when I find an error or omission, I can correct it and others will benefit. You have given me that already. However, that dream becomes exponentially more exciting when not only can I make those changes, but every other musician can as well.

I think git and GitHub give us many many tools to make that dream a reality. Just like every open source project, anyone can suggest a fix via email. Those interested in discussing issues can chime in in the Issues. Those with the requisite skills/interest to contribute can submit a pull request.

So, I'm excited about a book that I can have ownership in, but also helping facilitate others having ownership in it.

That's the core of my interest in this project, but the fact that it's open source has many many other benefits that make me excited:

• The data within the music that has been collected is accessible. Maybe some future hacker could use this as a starting point to find trends in music, or feed it to a computer learning algorithm and make a tune generator, or any of a thousand other ideas that you or I could never dream of.
• The project can be forked, so it's not dependent on being constantly maintained by one individual or organization.
• Git is low level. If this project should ever need to go underground, any server running, ssh or even http could act as it's new home. This feels very much in the spirit of the many shadowy groups who have come together in the past to compile and distribute these books.
• The work of copying these tunes out has been done over and over by many groups over time. With the music and typesetting in an open format, even if the next generation of maintainers have something better than Lilypond at their disposal, surely most of the effort of transcription could be automated. I dream that we could be the last ones in a long lineage of people copying out these tunes. Future people can dedicate their time to more interesting work like refining, adding or improving.

As you can see, I'm a little slower to stop myself from dreaming ;) However, I'm grounded in reality. I realize that all these dreams are predicated on us reaching a critical mass of tunes. Without that, the book is not useful enough to attract users. Without users none of these "extra" benefits come to fruition.

So. I'm eager to reach your goal of 100 tunes and then set another, more ambitious, goal! Of course more developers would make that job easier, but for now I'm of the mindset that rather than trying to recruit people by convincing them how great it could be, we should just improve the book and let the work do the convincing. You have done this to great effect already. Thank you.

[veltzer]

Cool... I like these ideas...