Hi everyone,
Almost everything below came straight out of your comments — the ones under Contacts and on the blog. Thank you for every one of them. They really are the to-do list for this site, and this week we got through a good chunk of it.
Your songbook is back
The most-asked question of the summer was some version of “how do I keep the tunes I’m working on in one place?” The answer is working again: open any chart, click Share above the score and pick Add to Playlist. Your lists live on your profile, on the Songbook tab, and you can have as many as you like — one for the Friday gig, one for tunes you’re learning, one for the ballads you keep forgetting. The same menu is where MusicXML export lives.
The button had quietly gone missing after we rebuilt the viewer, and it took an embarrassingly long time for us to notice. Sorry about that — and thanks to everyone who kept asking.
Transposing now leaves the key alone
This one came from a few of you at once, and it was a genuinely good catch. Until now, choosing “Trumpet, tenor sax, clarinet” moved both the page and the sound, so a B♭ player ended up reading in one key and playing along in another — a whole tone away from everyone else in the room.
There are now two separate controls in the toolbar above every lead sheet:
- Transpose — what you read: concert pitch, B♭ instruments, E♭ instruments, or bass clef for trombone, bass and cello. It’s remembered for every other chart you open.
- Key — what everyone hears: step it up or down a semitone at a time, and the name of the sounding key is right there on the button.
So a tenor player can read Autumn Leaves in C while the playback — melody, walking bass and comping alike — stays in B♭, where the rest of the band is. Singers get the other half of the deal: leave the instrument on concert pitch and move Key until the tune sits where your voice is happy.
Tunes that hide under another name
One of you pointed out that searching for “Black Orpheus” came up empty. The tune was here all along under its Brazilian title, Manhã de Carnaval — now both names find it. If you know another standard that goes by two names and only one of them works in search, tell us: those are quick fixes and they help everybody.
A hundred small things
The interface had quietly drifted into four different colour schemes, so everything — buttons, menus, dialogs, the cookie notice — now uses the same palette as the rest of the site. Hovering a button no longer shows two tooltips stacked on top of each other. Undo and Redo are actually visible. The day/night switch is a drawn sun and moon instead of a washed-out emoji. None of it is exciting on its own; together it’s a site that feels less like a workshop floor.
What stays free
The same as always, and this isn’t changing: reading all 2,428 jazz standards, transposing them to any key, and playing them back with the band — no account, no limits. Downloads (MusicXML, MEI, MIDI, PDF) are the paid part, and there’s a $1 single-score option if a subscription is more than you need.
So — what next?
This is the part where you come in. What would make Realbook.site more useful for you? A chart that’s missing, a feature that’s half-finished, something that works on your laptop but not on your phone, a standard whose chords look wrong to your ears — all of it is fair game.
Leave a comment right here under this post, drop a note on the Contacts page, or come say hello in the Telegram channel, where new charts get announced first. We read everything, we can’t promise to build everything, but the list above is what happens when you ask.
Meanwhile — pick a standard, put it in your key, and play. Or write your own lead sheet in the browser editor, which is a story for another post.
See you in the comments,
Marat
New charts announced first on our Telegram channel
