What Is “Comping” from a Fake Book?

Well, there are two terms we need to explain in this sentence: comping and fake book. So here we go.

• Comping is a colloquial music term for “accompaniment.” If you are singing a song and playing an instrument at the same time (i.e., piano or guitar), most likely you’re using the instrument to accompany yourself while singing. This normally involves playing the chords of the song in a way that is rhythmically suited to the style and supportive of the melody.
• A fake book is a book containing charts of tunes (rather than fully written-out arrangements). “So what’s a chart?” I hear you ask. Well, a chart (also known as a lead sheet) normally just has the treble staff (rather than a grand staff), and shows only the melody, lyrics, and chord symbols for a song. You then have to “fake” (or improvise) a piano arrangement based on this information.

Some charts don’t even show the melody of the song. They just have chord symbols and “slashes” showing the beats in each measure. This type of chart is sometimes referred to as a chord chart or slash chart. You don’t normally find this type of chart in fake books, but they are often used in band and rehearsal situations, where one of the players might prepare a chord chart to give everybody a quick “road map” of the song.

When improvising an arrangement from a chart, you will either be comping (if you are accompanying yourself singing, or accompanying another singer or instrumentalist) or you will be playing the melody (if you are playing solo piano, for example). If you want to play the melody, it would need to be shown on the chart, of course (i.e., not just a chord chart). In this chapter, we’ll focus on comping using chord charts as a simple way to get started. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how to play the melody from a fake book.

If you’re at all interested in playing popular music, there are great advantages to being able to work from fake books and charts. When you go to the music store and buy the sheet music for a popular song, what you are actually buying is somebody’s arrangement of that song for the piano. So, no matter how well you read and play it, your performance can only be as good as “someone else’s arrangement.” If you’re at all familiar with sheet music and folios of popular songs, you’ll know that the quality of arrangements out there is rather variable, to say the least. So an experienced player with a good understanding of harmony and styles will very often be able to improvise or “fake” a better arrangement, working from a fake book chart.

The individual charts in fake books are normally no longer than two pages (and frequently are just one or even half a page), which makes them easy to use “on the gig” (or when practicing at home), and means that each book can contain many different songs!