Dear bluegrass friend,
Allow me a short explanation of reasons why I have taken the effort to prepare the Jam Pack 2012. If you are in no mood to listen, skip to the next part which explains what does the Jam Pack contain. Otherwise, I am happy to share a few points and reasons, and perhaps also hopes for the future continuation of this project.
The Jam Pack started inconspicuously – I started to update some songs and found they were in much worse state than I ever thought. I started keeping songs in the MS Word on a consistent basis ever since a bottle of Becherovka (a gift from my friends) broke in my suitcase after arrival to Melbourne from the Czech Republic (about 1993). The baggage was probably mishandled by the airport staff. The poor wasted Becherovka made my hand-written songbooks smell very nicely, nevertheless the words and chords in the bottom third of every single page were unreadable. Well, thinking of this, it's almost unbelievable 20 years!
At the time I used to work for an Apple MacIntosh reseller, and my songs kept moving from the Apple platform to PC, then from continent to continent, from the Garamond font to Times Roman and what have you, and the Word versions since that time were uncounted. Therefore one could not talk about anything like consistent template whatsoever. I even heard that some songs I had on the net in some older Word version were not possible to open at all. Of course also the tabs were completely different from song to song, which caused the chords to show in a different spot per each individual user's software version.
For this reason I decided to make an order in this chaos, convert all songs to the newest Word format and also „seal“ them into the pdf format, so that the chords would not "run away" to other users on their computers. One would not believe, how much effort this all took. I thought, such a „miniproject“ I must be able to lead to a successful finish!
But it took its toll – for the odd 200 songs it took over four months of work, over the evenings and weekends, while my body starved for an exercise!
But soon I also realized that it was not only about a format update of those songs as such, but that such "Jam Pack" could finally become a basis for Open jam fans; I also realized that for many of these songs I do have available mp3s, and in between the multitudes of these lying idly on my hard disk, I was never able to find the time to select the best ones. So, for those of you, who keep saying "we don't know these songs", I have good news: it's finally here! For those of you, who really never had a chance to hear these songs, this is the same piece of good news – there's nothing easier, just visit an Open jam! Somebody out there should be able to tell you where to get the mp3s pack as well, so it can click in your head. And for you all, who know them very well, still, the option to turn them on in your car while on your way to a summer festival will surely be something like a good Habanero cigar.
To wrap it up, when one is toiling with something, there is nothing sweeter than a feeling that you saved that effort to countless other jam visitors, as now it will go like the perpetuum mobile – effortless going without that hard work, which has been done once and for all.
What's the content of Jam Pack 2012?
Firstly it is the content available on http://www.jam.bg4.eu/index.php/en/download-lyrics.html in the section Sam's lyrics:
- 209 songs in the pdf format(mostly bluegrass songs in English, also some Denver, Dylan or Pete Seeger)
- the songs have a key in the heading under their name in which the song is played, including the capo position, about half the songs have even the original speed in bpm (beats per minute), then there is also the band or performer, who plays the given song, an on the right there is the Music and Lyrics author (researched up to the large detail on the net – I tell you, sometimes you learn very weird things by this!)
- The complete index of these songs (one line per song) in the MS Excel and for those of you, who do not have it, the same in pdf (209 songs).
- The list also contains the key, capo position, sometimes the speed, authors and performers.
- The next index (one line per each mp3 version), to find out who sings a given mp3 version, once you get your hand on the mp3 Jam pack, (572 versions all up).
- I hope that this listing will come handy if you want to find authors, if you have to fill in this info after concerts or festivals for you local authors kartel organization.
Then it is also:
- 572 mp3, covering all songs of the abovenamed song book (bar two that I could not find). From the total number you can see that it comes roughly to 2,7 versions per one song.The mp3 pack size is almost 2,5Gb, this is the reason why I don't upload it to the internet (and I don't even want to start thinking about the related legal problems). However if you bring your media, laptop etc. I will gladly help you. If you find you have a better version, I will gladly add it to the Jam Pack.
Even when we live in this day and era, which is in my opinion unnecessarily complicated by author's rights for songs that in our genre of music still cannot provide the livelihood to almost anyone, I hope that this is not the end, but only a beginning of sensible co-operation of amateur bluegrass jam-goers.
Therefore I add also a simple song template in MS Word, in which you can create or update your own songs and keep them in the same style as the rest in the Jam Pack, and I also hope that you will build on the Jam Pack so that we all get nicely and sensibly "synchronized", as to the jam standards. I will give it a rest for some time now, my body aches and hurts, hands, back, I need also to play and do some sport.
Sam
