Pop, Rock & Country Real & Fake Books

Real books and fake books might sound like opposites, but the truth is that they're pretty similar! If you're new to the concept, here's a two-second primer: fake books were first created to make it easy to learn songs, by breaking them down to only the very basic chords and sometimes lyrics. Musicians playing from these books were "faking it" - hence the name. In the 1970s, new books emerged that also contained melody lines, and they were called "real books" to distinguish them from fake books. These earliest materials were mostly dedicated to jazz music, but today they cover virtually every genre, including the selection of pop, rock and country real and fake books you're looking at right now.

There are a few different ways to classify the books found here, and you can go by whichever one makes the most sense to you. For instance, you could browse for real and fake books devoted to specific instruments, like the Hal Leonard Scott The Piano Guy's Favorite Piano Fake Book Volume 2 or the Hal Leonard The Greatest Rock Guitar Fake Book. Or, you might decide to try your hand at your favorite band or artist's tunes with the likes of the Alfred Rolling Stones Fake Book or the Hal Leonard Beatles Fake Book.

If you'd rather search based on wider themes, there are lots of more generalized real and fake books that give you the option to diversify. Rock'n'rollers, for example, will probably appreciate Hal Leonard's The Real Rock Book - Vol. 1. For the holiday season, you might pick up the Hal Leonard The Christmas Caroling Songbook. Or, for year-round Sunday fare, how about the Brentwood-Benson Praise and Worship Fake Book - Guitar? Choosing the best titles is a cinch when you know what you're looking for.

So don't hesitate to dive in to this lineup of pop, rock and country real and fake books! Make yourself a mental checklist of the genres, instruments and themes you're interested in shopping for, and then finding the right books for you will be a simple matter of picking out the ones that tick off all the points on that list. And once you've got your new books in your collection, you can experiment with the music to your heart's content.