All lead sheets are formatted using a music-typesetting engine ( Lilypond ).

The lead sheets can be viewed in high quality on the screen as well as downloaded as PDF files.

Because the actual music is stored in the MusicXML format, all tunes can be transposed to arbitrary keys with ready made links Bb and Eb instrument versions.

As for how long it has been around, the page itself contains surprisingly little information about its history or the people behind it.

The earliest lead-sheet submissions are from Sun, 5 November 2006 implying the site has been around almost five years.

That implies currently about 4000 lead sheets in the data base.

Particularly for popular tunes there are often multiple versions, so the actual number of distinct tunes is somewhat smaller.

Using the jazz tag, turns up 40 pages of 10 songs for a total of approximately 400 Jazz standards.

Again, because some tunes have multiple entries, there are slightly less than 400 Jazz standards in the database.

Im sure everybody has seen Fake Books with a great number of songs that were mostly irrelevant or obscure, at least from a gig-playing perspective.

The Wikifonia column contains how many distinct lead sheets for a song were found.

What one might consider good depends on the intended purpose and to a good extent on personal taste and preferences.

I took this as an opportunity to give the Wikifonia lead sheets a real-world test.

All the tunes on the list were tried and true session material and were all available.

I used Wikifonias transpose feature to download a version in F.

What I personally didnt like was that the sheet also contained a silly and very cliche ending.

In addition to this ending in the middle of the song there was a Coda that consisted of the last three bars at half speed.

Again, this appeared like some pretty typical ending material, that in my opinion doesnt have to be on the lead sheet.

Wikifonia deliberately limits the format of its lead sheets to a single staff for a single-note melody and chord symbols.

The following scanned image shows the size difference of my Wikifonia print-out and the Real-Easy Book sheet.

Jazz Music Blogspot Download