If you’re not familiar with Darcy James Argue and his big band, Secret Society, I encourage you to check out his music. Argue has a unique style of big band writing that has been described as big band jazz with an art rock sensibility. I like how he explores extended formal structures, different grooves, and otherwise bends the rules while still keeping at least one foot in the big band tradition. His band, Secret Society, is made up of some of the top jazz musicians around.
Argue has put up some materials for free on his web site that offer advice to jazz composers and arrangers for how to prepare their music so that the musicians are able to most easily read the charts and play your music better. He describes standard notation practices such as how large a font you should print your charts on, what size paper, how to properly beam rhythms, and more.
Darcy James Argue’s Music Preparation Materials
Looking through his materials there’s some stuff in there that I haven’t thought of before and will start adopting in my own charts. It’s very important to prepare your sheet music in the clearest manner and follow standard notation practice in order to get the best first reading of your music and then get the best possible performance. It can be very tedious to spend all that time getting your sheet music to follow all the conventions, but anything that you can do that will make it easier on the musicians who perform your music will only make your music sound better.
As an amateur musician of modest reading ability I can confirm how important clarity of notation is. Sometimes the music I play is so poorly written I have to transcribe certain sections just so I can play it. Here’s an idea out of left field – why don’t they write first and second big band parts for trombone in tenor clef like they do in the orchestra? It would avoid having to read all those nasty ledger lines. I once transcribed a particularly badly written part into tenor clef to the bemusement of my section colleagues!