Lead sheets, also for B♭, E♭ and F instruments

A lead sheet is what a band reads from: one staff with the tune (the “lead”), the chords written above it as chord symbols, and the song’s key, time signature, sections and repeats. The bass line, the drums and how the piano voices its chords are left for the players to make up. Jazz, pop and folk musicians carry whole books of them.

Ferrous Lineup writes one from your song: the tune is the notes of one channel, and the chords are those of the chord sheet.

The Lead sheet window

View > Lead sheet opens it. The sheet is laid out on pages as it will print, and the bar that plays lights up while the song plays.

Along the top:

• Melody: the channel whose notes are the tune. Auto takes the channel called Lead, which every song demo has, or else the channel whose notes are highest. Pick another for another part, the bass for a bass player. None: chords only writes a slash for every beat under the chord symbols, as a rhythm section reads its part.
• Clef: Auto writes a low tune in the bass clef and the others in the treble clef; Treble and Bass choose one.
• For: who reads it (see below).
• Paper: A4, used almost everywhere, or Letter, in the USA and Canada.
• − and + zoom the pages.
• Export PDF… saves the sheet as a PDF file.
• Print… opens the PDF in your PDF viewer, to print it from there with your printer’s own settings.

The window only reads the song: nothing in the song changes. The paper, the zoom and the choice under For are remembered.

Reading a lead sheet

On the first line, from the left:

• the clef: the treble clef curls around the G line, the second from the bottom; the bass clef’s two dots sit around the F line;
• the key signature: the sharps or flats of the key, so they need not be written on every note. Two flats, B♭ and E♭, are B♭ major or G minor; a note outside the key gets its own sharp, flat or natural, which lasts until the bar line;
• the time signature, only on the first line and where it changes;
• the tempo, as in “♩ = 176”, 176 quarter notes a minute.

Above the staff, each chord symbol stands where its chord starts, and lasts until the next one. The small number at the start of each line is the bar number of its first bar, so a band can say “from bar 21”. Further on, a lead sheet can have:

• rehearsal marks, the name of a section in a box where it starts; each section starts a new line, so the form of the song shows at a glance;
• repeat signs, a thick and a thin bar line with two dots, around a section played twice, and “×3” when it is played three times or more;
• a double bar line before a new section and before a change of key, where the new key signature is written;
• the final bar line, thin and thick, at the end.

The app chooses how each note is written as an engraver would: a note of the key as the key spells it, a note of the chord as the chord spells it (G♯ over E7 in C major, A♭ over Fm), and a note that moves a semitone by the way it goes (F♯ going up to G, B♭ going down to A). Notes are split and tied so that the beats of the bar can be seen.

For B♭, E♭ and F instruments

Ask a pianist and a trumpet player to play the first note of a song in C together, from the same sheet, and they won’t agree: the pianist plays C, and the trumpet, reading the same C, sounds the B♭ a tone lower. The trumpet is a transposing instrument. Wind instruments come in families of different sizes, and on all the saxophones, for instance, the same fingers play the note written C. So music for them is written for the fingers, and each instrument is named after the note that sounds when it plays a written C: a trumpet in B♭, an alto saxophone in E♭, a horn in F. Music written as it sounds is at concert pitch.

So a song in C is written in D for every B♭ instrument, in A for every E♭ instrument and in G for every F instrument. Choose one under For and the sheet changes at once: the key signature, the tune and the chord symbols move together, the top of the first page says who the part is for, and Export PDF… puts it in the file name, as in “I Got Rhythm (Bb instruments).pdf”, so the parts of a song don’t overwrite each other. The kind of key stays, and a key never gets more than six sharps or flats: a part that would be in C♯ major is written in D♭ major.

The picture shows why so many jazz tunes are in flat keys: I Got Rhythm is in B♭ major, two flats, and the part for B♭ instruments is in C major, with no sharps or flats at all. Concert E♭ is C for the alto saxophone, too.

The lead sheet can also be shown in a video of the song: see Exporting.