How I Actually Use iReal Pro on a Gig
A chart isn't there so you can read the tune - it's there so that when someone says "take it from the pre-chorus, but the second time we hold the B", everyone is looking at the same page and nobody has to explain it twice.
That distinction took me a while to arrive at, because for years I didn't use charts at all. I preferred memorising everything, and I was quietly proud of it, right up until I started doing enough gigs that memorising stopped being a virtue and started being a risk - different bands, different arrangements of the same song, a set list that changes at eight in the evening.
So this is how I build one now. It takes about ten minutes for a pop song, and honestly the decisions matter a lot more than the software.
Watch the video version:
Why iReal Pro, and why the ninety-six bar template
iReal Pro ships with the jazz templates most people know it for - AABA, ABAC - and then a couple of long ones at the bottom of the list. I use the ninety-six measure template, and the reason is nothing more romantic than space.
A pop song fits on one page at ninety-six bars. If I need to stretch a bar out to explain something, I can take bar lines away rather than keep adding pages mid-song, and when you're playing a four hour function set the last thing you want is a chart that runs to three pages because you couldn't be bothered to think about the layout.
The other side of that is that if your chart is one page, you can see the whole arrangement at a glance, which is the entire point. A chart you have to scroll through is a chart you'll stop trusting.
The two settings I change before I write a single chord
The composer field. Technically that's meant to be the original songwriter, and if you were submitting charts to a library you'd fill it in properly. What I actually do is put the name of the band or artist I'm playing the song with, because the same song turns up in two different bands with two slightly different arrangements, and this is how I know which version I'm looking at without opening anything else.
The key. Don't trust whatever the recording is listed as online. Play it, find the key by ear, then set it - I do this before anything else, because every single chart I've got wrong was wrong here, and a chart in the wrong key is worse than no chart at all.
Both of those take about fifteen seconds and save you the specific embarrassment of counting in the wrong key in front of a band that already knows the song.
What I actually label the sections
I label sections the way I think about them on stage, not the way a score does, and I've been doing it long enough that it's just how my brain reads a page now.
- IN - intro, instrumental, interlude. Anything without a vocal in it gets the same label, because in the moment they're all the same instruction, which is "keep playing, nobody's singing yet".
- A - verse.
- B - pre-chorus.
- C - chorus.
Each section ends with a double bar line. That's the thing that tells you where a section stops when you're scanning the page halfway through a song and someone has just nodded at you to take it somewhere.
The small things that make it fast
Count the intro properly the first time. Most pop songs are built in four, eight or sixteen bars, so listen once and count it, rather than guessing and planning to fix it later - later never comes, and you'll be counting under your breath on the gig instead.
Use the repeat symbol instead of writing the chord twice. One chord over two bars becomes the chord plus a percentage sign. Same meaning, half the ink, and the page stays readable at a glance.
Copy and paste, but not blindly. Selecting a chunk and pasting it forward is by far the quickest way to build a verse you've already played once. The catch is that the selection grabs the markings along with the chords - repeat signs, bar line types, all of it - so about half the time it's genuinely faster to just retype B minor than to unpick what got dragged along with it.
Mark the gap before the chorus. Most pop songs have a beat of nothing before the chorus lands - the band drops out, and then everything comes back in together. That beat is what the no-chord symbol is for: it is the button that literally prints N.C. on the chart, which is the app saying nobody plays here. If you don't write it in, you'll fill it, because playing nothing when you're not sure is much harder than playing something. So I write the chord that ends the section, then put N.C. in the next slot. The catch is that N.C. is a long bit of text and it pushes the rest of the bar out of shape, so straight after it I press S, which drops it to small type and leaves the spacing alone. S is small, N is normal, and if you leave the size blank it inherits whatever the previous chord was.
Chord size inherits, so put it back when you're done. Whatever size you set stays on for the next chord you type, which is why a shrunk N.C. leaves everything after it small too. Press N to go back to normal size before you carry on. Small is for cramming information into a bar - a long chord name, a specific voicing, the N.C. - and normal is for every actual chord.
None of this is difficult. It's just the difference between a chart you made in ten minutes and a chart you'll actually use.
The mistake I see everyone make: repeat signs too early
This is the one that matters, and it's the reason a lot of charts quietly fail.
It is very tempting to write the verse out once, drop a repeat sign on it, and call the chart finished. I don't do that - not until the second verse, and here's why. Pop arrangements almost always change something on the way back round. A half chorus. An instrumental. A last line that goes somewhere different. If you've collapsed the whole thing into a repeat sign, your chart is now lying to you, and you find out about it in front of people rather than in your own headphones.
So I write the first pass out in full, every bar, even when it's repetitive and even when it feels like a waste of a morning. Then, once I know what actually repeats, I put the repeat sign in and jump back to the A section.
The chart ends up shorter and more accurate, because I earned the shortcut instead of assuming it. And when the band does something different on the second chorus, which they always do, the page already has room for it.
What a chart is actually for
A chart is not a transcription, and the moment it becomes one it stops being useful to me.
Mine have chords, section labels, a couple of notes about feel or a specific voicing, and nothing else. If I need more than that it's not a chart anymore, it's an arrangement, and that's a different conversation that takes longer than ten minutes and usually involves other people.
The test I use is simple: could someone else dep for me on this gig with this page in front of them, and get through the night without asking me a question?
If yes, it's finished. If they'd have questions, the page isn't done, no matter how neat it looks.
Brent's Two Cents:
If you're new to reading charts, my advice is to start with songs you already know inside out, and chart those first. It feels pointless because you don't need the chart, but that's exactly the point - you're not learning the song, you're learning the process, and you'll notice immediately when something on the page doesn't match what you hear in your head.
Do that five or six times and charting becomes automatic, and then it's a genuine safety net instead of homework.
Before you go
If you want to see any of this in action, the video at the top of this post walks through the whole thing in real time, including the parts where I make a mess of the selection tool - which is, honestly, part of the process.
Thanks for reading, and I hope your next gig has a chart that actually tells the truth. Until next time. Cheers!