Customer Reviews

Wedding & Love Fake Book: C Edition (Fake Books)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the book for musicians that do a lot of wedding gigs. The title speaks for itself, but take it from me... You'll never go astray at a wedding gig again. It's great for any gig requiring love songs, but ideal for weddings and receptions. A must have.

I purchased this book to use for a wedding recently and it's a great addition to my music library. It has a great variety of songs for different parts of the ceremony and reception. I purchased it mainly for the classical wedding pieces - Trumpet Voluntary, Air on the G String, etc. - and it worked out great. The other songs are a nice extra and might come in handy some day. I have several fakebooks, so I'm comfortable with the format and it's not too hard to learn the songs.

A solidly huge collection of favorite love songs, from church music to contemporary pop. Although some arrangements may slightly differ from the original songs, it has proved useful on a number of occasions for weddings, parties and personal repertoire expansion. Highly recommended for jazz and pop musicians who often play for crowds and special events, and are asked requests frequently.

This book has a great selection of songs and the loose-leaf binding means it will stay on the page you choose. Guitarists may be dissppointed in the number of songs that are in guitar-unfriendly keys like Eb, Db and Ab.

I'm 37, and have a lot of background in Broadway musicals and choir, so I thought I'd be at least vaguely familiar with most of the traditional songs in this book. But I was very wrong. Not only are most of these songs from the 30s, 40s and 50s, with very few current selections (and many of the current selections are cheesy 80s songs that I can't ever see wanting to sing) - but there's very little on the page to help you identify which song you're looking at. Even a notation on each page as to what artist made the song popular would have been immensely helpful, but it's not there - so unless you know the name of the *composer* (not the artist) or every long song released since 1927, you'll find yourself flipping through this book staring at a lot of unfamiliar songs. I mean really, how hard would it have been to include a little line saying "Made popular by Barbra Streisand" or somesuch? That would have made a huge difference in identifying what songs we wanted to add to our playlist, because we're certainly not going to sit and sightread 270 songs looking for something we know.

The book is useful for my guitarist, since he can flip to any page at random and play filler during empty spots, but my sightreading as a vocalist is unfortunately not as quick. I need to have at least a general idea of what the song sounds like in order for me to jump in and perform it, so this book is not very useful for me. I'd say that out of the entire book, there are something like ten songs I know and like, which is a pretty lousy ratio for a such a large book. :(