I still think the best way to go with playalongs is to create the files yourself using Band-in-a-Box, as I have been doing for nearly 20 years. If you are even vaguely an audiophile, you'll probably be able to tell the difference! If you are going to go the Aebersold route, I'd personally buy the physical book + CD if they're still available. I believe Hal Leonard also sells the realbook digitally with accompaniments for EVERYTHING which is a much better deal than the Aebersold books in terms of pure money/songs but I don't personally own it so I can't comment on the quality further other than to say I studied with some of the guys who did the recordings and they were no slouches! Although the DRM mechanism forces you to use something like the Kindle app which is a real drag for a multitude of reasons. The Hal Leonard Real Book is missing some good tunes but is actually a pretty good resource either way AND you can buy them digitally. OR they have a copy of the RealBook (or FakeBooks) and just want the playalongs. I would suspect most people buying them from the Apple Store digitally have a hard copy of the book and have lost the CD (or tape or even vinyl!) and sought a replacement. I dropped Apple quite some time ago in part because of similar proprietary limitations on syncing. You might want to contact Apple customer support if you are having difficulties. The digital copies are probably a legal limitation of some kind for how they acquired the rights to publish those leadsheets in the first place. That sounds like a problem with iTunes or your hardware, not a necessarily a limitation on the content itself. How to learn tunes is another post i guess. Not bad.Īs noted by MattK above, now that I've played for a while, I actually prefer to play along with actual recordings of the tune I'm working on, in addition to transcribing it. 2-5-1s, blues, and rhythm changes in all 12 keys. I personally would just prefer if you could do it all through iTunes. So you need to find the tunes on line or figure out the changes yourself if you don't know the tune. Further, they don't send lead sheets digitally, only hard copy to physical address. A number of tracks will not transfer onto my phone for some reason- just computer, and others required multiple download attempts. I recently downloaded a few Aerbersold albums. Rhythm sections tend to like it when I play like that! I find that if I practice moving the time too far in any direction that when I play with people they follow instead of acting like the dutiful robots I'm expecting!! I can kind of cope with that by doing metronome on beat 1 of measures and trying to generate the time myself so that I'm within a certain way of playing but still keeping my own time. I suppose it's possible to work on style/time too with a playalong but I find it harder since you don't have the interplay you'd normally have with the other musicians. If I want to work on style, I'll do transcriptions and play along with whomever I'm transcribing. I generally don't use mine for feel, I use them so I can make sure that I'm keeping the form properly (hitting all the changes) as you mentioned. It's one thing to play notes that fit, even lots of them, and quite another to leave the rhythm section hurting for time. One thing they never tell you while working out with a play along, is to play more swinging than the guys on the recording.

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