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<\/a>Now, growing up in the before-times<\/em> (before the internet) and hanging around jazz musicians, charts were an everyday occurrence in “The Real Book<\/a>,” which is basically the bible of all tunes jazz (or, at least it used to be… I suspect nothing has really changed except that it’s now found in an app.)<\/p>\nThe main thing you have to remember about a chart<\/em>, as opposed to sheet music<\/em>, is that a chart is NOT going to explain how a specific recording of a song is played. It is not a transcription<\/em>, it is simply the melody, and the chords, to a song. No more, no less.<\/p>\n (In fact, sheet music<\/em> is not a transcription<\/em> either. Sheet music is, in general, more verbose than a chart, but it is still not the act of listening to a specific recording and writing down (transcribing) what is actually played by the guitar player.)<\/p>\n What we commonly call “TABs” today are sometimes like a lead sheet (and usually not even that much) and sometimes more like a transcription… depending on the source.<\/p>\n Sometimes you’ll also hear a chart called a “leadsheet” or even a “fakebook arrangement” of a song. It allows a band to “fake” their way through the song without having to have heard it before.<\/p>\n It contains the 3 fundamental aspects of a song – the chords, the feel, and the melody… again, nothing more and nothing less.<\/p>\n Now, if you’re the player, how well you can get through a chart like the image above is simply about how well you know your chords, how well you can make up some sort of rhythm figure on the fly, and (if you have the melody) how well you can read the melody.<\/p>\n For a jazz combo (and I’ve done a LOT of those over the years) it’s typical that all I have to do is play the chords and let either the piano or a horn take the melody. Every once in a while I’ll take a melody or we’ll pass it around – it depends a lot on the group. Once we’ve played the whole chart through (the melody is called the head<\/em>) then we go back to the top and play solos until everyone who wants to solo is done (or the client has fired us for noodling too much) and then we play the head again and end the tune with either whatever ending is written, a tag, or a standard ending.<\/p>\n Your approach to a chart is also going to have a lot to do with your familiarity with the tune being played. If you know the most popular recording of this tune and you’ve heard it many times, you’ll likely have no trouble getting pretty close to the recording because you know the general feel and style of the original recording.<\/p>\n But let’s turn it around – what if you want to make a chart for a group (or maybe just you and a friend,) how much do you need on it?<\/p>\n Well, first, let’s talk about the lyrics, because a lot of “charts” I see these days look like this:<\/p>\n And… let’s be really clear about something… this is useless to anyone unless they are VERY familiar with the song.<\/p>\n But if you intend for this to go to someone who has never played the song before, you’re asking for trouble. There is no sense of rhythm or time, and there are no barlines or anything to give any guitar player any indication of how long to play any given chord.<\/p>\n The especially “trainwreck-y” parts will be the chord changes all scrunched together at the end of a line because there are no words under them as they are typically instrumental. It’s total guessing game for any guitar player, bass player, drummer, keyboard player, etc.<\/p>\n This is a fine example of something I would use (and do often) to remind myself of a song I’ve played many times before, but probably haven’t played recently. I might forget some lyrics and I might forget a chord or 2, so this acts as a prompter, if nothing else.<\/p>\n So it’s not useless, by any means, but it’s probably not as useful to someone else as it would be to the person writing it.<\/p>\n Another type of chart, or really more of a transcription, that I see lately looks like this:<\/p>\n This is intended to be a transcription – in other words this is EXACTLY what was played. The problem is, it’s not doing a very good job of telling me what’s going on because there is no rhythm.<\/p>\n It’s telling me the notes using TAB, but I don’t know what notes are 1\/8th notes, what are 1\/16th notes, if it’s in 4\/4 time or 12\/8 time – none of that is there.<\/p>\n So again, it assumes I know very well what this is supposed to sound like, and that I have good enough inner time to make it sound that way.<\/p>\n For most people I encounter, that’s a BIG assumption and if you’re trying to learn songs from this sort of TAB… and it doesn’t sound right, that may be why (aside from the fact that the person who wrote it may not play as well as you do and it’s likely incorrect.)<\/p>\n So let’s look at something that might be more useful… here’s a chart I made for a rhythm section (bass, drums, keyboards) assuming that someone else (maybe me, maybe someone who knows the song) is singing – so there is no melody:<\/p>\n But you can see that I have some important things:<\/p>\n Now sometimes charts are general charts, like you just saw… but if you want a musician to play something a certain way, you will probably have to have something that is very specific – approaching sheet music quality like this:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>\n