Horn charts for bands that already gig

Most working bands are playing charts nobody wrote

The usual situation is a band with a horn section, a set list of forty tunes, and no written parts for most of them. The horns learned them by ear, three players ago, and each new player learns them off the last one. It works until the day it doesn't, which is always a wedding.

A book fixes that permanently. Forty tunes, written for the section you carry, in parts your players can read down cold at a rehearsal. Pricing is $15 per horn per tune because the parts are what drive the work: a book of forty is $1,800 for a wedding band with three horns, $2,400 for four, $3,000 for five and $3,600 for six. Anything that's not a wedding band is twenty percent less, which is $1,440 to $2,880 for the same books. A single custom chart elsewhere runs $75 to $150, so the book is the deal.

The five-minute cap per tune is worth understanding rather than skipping. Most pop and soul charts land well inside it. A ten-minute arrangement with a written solo section is a different piece of work, so it gets quoted before I start rather than appearing on an invoice afterwards.

What you get is transposed parts for each horn, playable in the keys your singer sings in, with the hits, backgrounds and shout sections written rather than remembered. If a tune needs to be transposed for a new vocalist later, that's a small job on an existing chart rather than starting again.

If your band is deciding between three and four horns before commissioning a book, that decision is worth making first, because it changes what gets written. There's a whole page on it, and I'd rather you read that than pay for parts a fourth player never shows up to play.

What that means in practice

I also work with Couples planning a wedding, School and university band directors, Venues, restaurants and event planners, Parents and adult beginners.