Inexpensive way to get lead sheets of melody/vocal

There are times I wish I had lead sheets to actually see the ukulele songs with lead sheet type music notation so I can see where the chords change and to see the melody line. It would be nice to work out some chord accents to go with the melody.

Are there any best case fake books and/or Real Books out there that ukulele players use and recommend? I have three volumes of the New Real Book that I'll go through but they are mostly jazz songs.

Anyone like and use the Parking Lot Picker's Songbook by Dix Bruce? I'm thinking of getting the Bass Edition.

Ed

MANY MANY MANY folks use and LOVE the Daily Ukulele (3 different editions now), see here:

http://dailyukulele.com/

I got my copies autographed by the authors at UKE NJ 3! back in 2015 and use them ALL THE TIME.

The leader of our group, Cali Rose, has one hour classes Saturdays for beginners and advanced beginners and she asks all participants to get the Daily Ukulele.

Yeah, The Daily Uke does seem to be the ukers go to.

Daily Ukulele as well. But I also find a lot of stuff on the internet. If you are looking for sheet music, sometimes if you type the song that you are looking for into your search engine, then click on images you will find song sheets with the notes. I have also saved a dozen songbooks that various ukulele clubs have shared on the internet. Most of them are only lead sheets, not notes or melodies, but I'm constantly searching and finding new songs. There is a lot out there, it just takes some work to find what you are looking for.

The "Daily Ukulele" books are a great start.
I also use the Ukulele Fake Book (Hal Leonard), 400 + songs.
The "Great Gig" book is also one of my go to's.

I have one of the Daily Ukulele books and really like it. When I want the lead sheet to a specific song I go to musicnotes.com where many are available for purchase and download. Lead sheets are typically $2 to $3.50 (cheaper than the standard piano/vocal arrangements). Many of the lead sheets are specifically for ukulele but it really doesn't matter. I grab a lead sheet when I know the chords to a song but I want to see a little more of what's going on in the melody.

Here's a sample.

Standard disclaimer; I don't work for musicnotes.com but if they see this post and want to sponsor me I can be had for a price

I have to thank you all. I completely forgot I have both books but I've been off in UBass land restarting daily sight reading bass clef.

Sort of a major Duh! moment here in senior land. I just ordered the Parking Lot Pickers Songbook, Bass Edition. Many of th "swing" songs we do are in the New Real Books. I'll look at the Hal Leonard Fake Book.

Thanks to all for your generous advice.

Ed

Hal Leonard also has a gigantic fake book for ukulele...400 songs. I don't own it, but may buy it eventually. It is $37 in print, $31 on the iBook Store.

My only thoughts looking at it so far is that the keys/chords are not necessarily ukulele friendly--whereas the Daily Ukulele (and Leap Year Edition) are specifically written to be ukulele friendly.

It seems that most musicians don't even need the actual "lead sheet" these days...I like having the music notation in front of me, but I'm a trained classical musician. In a jam, it can be a negative as people who don't read sing whatever notes they think are in a melody (or often, how it is sung in some recording) versus what is written...and Beloff does make different choices with melody on a regular basis. My tendency, at that point, is to sing what is written. And I don't sing softly in a jam (I'm not one of the folks who is afraid to sing). So that can be interesting, too.

My advice is to move beyond tabs. They are so limiting. Take 30 seconds and learn about "FACE" and "Every Good Boy Does Fine"--then you can read standard notation (ignoring, of course, all the nuances like all the Italian words and the rests and alii). Once you do that, you can download any lead sheet, written for any instrument, and play it on ukulele (unless it spans more than two octaves). For example, I am playing around with some melodies I lifted from some cello music.

That being said, here's what I do: learn standard notation, download sheet music, listen/watch a professional performance of the music to get the timing, play the notes and/or chords on the sheet. If you do that, you can avoid the majority of ukulele music which still is haunted by the ghosts of Tiny Tim and George Formby and sounds like elevator music with a reggae down beat.