Best Places to Find Horn Charts and Band Sheet Music
Last updated August 2026. Links and pricing checked and refreshed.
If you're a bandleader, you know that finding good sheet music for cover bands is challenging. You either make it yourself or hire someone else to do it. Sometimes you can find free sheet music online, but it's usually rough and rarely the arrangement you actually want.
We've put together some reliable and some obscure places to find quality sheet music for your band.
A word of caution about the big distributors. When searching online, you'll see sheetmusicplus.com, musicnotes.com, and jwpepper.com come up. For bandleaders, they're not worth much time unless you're desperate. They're fine for a lead sheet (piano and vocal), but if you're looking for parts for each instrument in your band, they won't get you far.
|
WARNING: If you're searching for "horn charts" and you run across a site called Horn Section Arranging at nobilicollinedelmonferrato.it, don't click it. It's a phishing site. |
Sheet Music Catalogs
Party Band Sheet Music is the go-to choice for bandleaders who need modern, downloadable sheet music for every jazz and cover band instrument. They have an extensive collection of funk and soul classics arranged for 3 to 5 horns and rhythm section, ready to use.
For older pieces, try Iowa music printer C.L. Barnhouse. They have archives dating back to 1886. Jazz, solo, ensembles, marching bands and orchestras.
If you can't find what you want, college libraries often hold more obscure material. Ohio State University maintains a downloadable sheet music guide you can search by:
- Classical
- Jazz Lead Sheets and Chord Changes
- Choral and Art Song
- 19th and 20th Century Popular Songs
- Band
Each category links out to multiple libraries and guides. Under Jazz Lead Sheets, for example, they list Free Jazz Chord Charts That You Can Transpose, roughly 1,300 chord charts of jazz standards you can move to any key.
If you need something customized for your band or a particular gig, a transcription service is the way to go.
Custom Transcription Services
Can't find the sheet music you want? Upload any audio, video, or YouTube URL to a transcription service and they'll turn it into readable parts.
Transcribe A Song is one option, priced per audio minute.
Note: transcription pricing moves around. The specific per-song quotes that used to appear in this article were from 2020 and are no longer accurate, so we've removed them. Check each service's current rates directly.
Online Sheet Music Sellers
These sellers cater to cover, jazz, and horn bands specifically.
Horn Charts 4 Less - worth a look on a tight budget, though they state that different arrangers write the charts and accuracy isn't guaranteed.
Pepperhorn.com - search by artist, song title, album, composer, or era.
Free Horn Charts - free, but limited.
Internet Sources for Big Band Arrangements - Fredonia College in New York has a searchable music library.
Horn Band Charts - good for horns, not much for other instruments.
Scribd.com - mostly books, but they carry sheet music too.
Best Way to Store and Share Your Sheet Music
Now that you've gone to the expense and trouble of finding and downloading your charts, where do they live so they don't get lost?
In Back On Stage, every song in your repertoire holds its own PDF chart, key, tempo, and a reference recording. Build a setlist and every musician on the gig gets the whole package in the app before downbeat. That matters most when you call a sub at short notice: they get the real chart instead of a YouTube link and a group text.
You can also export every chart in a setlist at once and drop them straight into ForScore, which beats importing one PDF at a time before a gig.
May 08, 2024 • Posted by ROGER SALLES
Do you have 3 horn parts for Easy like Sunday morning by Lionel Ritchie?
May 08, 2024 • Posted by Bill
Another website I have found very helpful is hornarrangements.com