A horn chart is the written part a horn player reads on the stand: their line, in their key, with the hits, backgrounds and figures written out so that a player who has never heard the arrangement can play it correctly the first time.
What's on it
- The player's own line, transposed. An alto saxophone, a tenor and a trumpet all read different notes to produce the same sound. Every part is written in the key that player reads, which is why one shared page doesn't work.
- The form. Where the intro ends, how many bars of vamp, where the repeat goes, where the ending is. Most on-stage horn disasters are form disasters, not note disasters.
- The hits and backgrounds. The stabs behind the vocal and the pads under the verse, written rather than remembered.
- Articulation and dynamics. The difference between a section that sounds tight and one that sounds approximately together is almost entirely here.
What changes when a band gets written parts
The obvious thing is rehearsal time: a section reads a new tune down in one pass instead of learning it by ear over three rehearsals. The less obvious and more valuable thing is that the band becomes survivable. A player drops out two days before a wedding, a sub shows up who has never heard the band, and they can play the gig from the page. Without charts, every horn player is a single point of failure carrying the arrangement in their head.
What a book of forty is
Forty tunes, written for your section, in your singer's keys. That's roughly a working band's whole live repertoire, which is the point: half a book leaves you back where you started on the tunes that weren't written. Tunes are priced up to five minutes at the book rate, and anything longer gets quoted before I start rather than appearing later.
Getting the keys right first
Send the actual keys your singer sings them in, not the original recording keys. Rewriting a book because it was written in the record's key is avoidable work and it's the single most common thing that goes wrong at the start of a commission.
Rates by section size are on the pricing page, and how many horns your band needs is worth reading first if that's still open.