Why I created iGigBook

They say necessity is the mother of invention and this have never been truer with respect to the creation of this application. I own a large number of physical fake books, all of the bootleg real books, all of the New Real Books and a host of others. The challenge for me has always been, given a list of tunes I may do at a gig, getting all of the music together in one place so that I can use it effectively. To meet this challenge I created a binder with just the indexes of all of the books and when I need to find a tune, I would consult the index of each book to see if the tune was in it. A little tedious, but way better than flipping through pages of a book. Once I located the songs I would make copies of pages or print copies from PDF versions of the books to create a "gig book" that I would play from at the gig. This worked pretty good when I would need a number of tunes from different books and is way better than lugging multiple books around and having the music ready to play. The problem with this was that it seems that on every gig tunes tend to get called that are not in the book I created(but may be in the book that I own) and that I don't either remember or know.

Until the iPad there wasn't a device that was large enough and with sufficient battery longevity that was portable with the ability for me to create software to make getting access to this information more efficient. Incidently, the realbook.us site was a side effect of trying to create a transposable chord chart resource on a windows mobile device way back in 2002, the small screen, dismall battery life and lack of processing power didn't make such a tool practical so the next best thing for easy access was the web and realbook.us was born.

I'm primarly a Microsoft Windows based software developer and so the adoption of the Mac OS and the iPhone development platform was a slow one simply because I'm busy gigging and writing software for clients. Once I got with Mac OSX I was able to get up to speed with the iPhone development tools and make far more effecient a process I've doing for a long time.

I've had a lot of fun developing this tool and testing it on actual gigs in addition to interacting with other musicians and listening to their feedback and ideas. iGigBook and the iPad are currently what I use on gigs be they Jazz standards or reading gigs and having a wealth of music available to me at my fingertips just makes a whole lot more possible. Hopefully you'll think the same.