Printable Music Manuscript with Chord Boxes (Free PDF)

Plain staff paper leaves nowhere sensible to put chord symbols: they end up crowded above the top line or scrawled between systems. This sheet gives every stave its own box above it, ruled off from the music and divided into four bars, so the chart and the notation line up bar for bar. Short tick marks drop from each bar division to the top of the stave, marking where the bar begins without printing a barline through music you have not written yet.

The bars are numbered straight through the page - 1 to 4 on the first system, 5 to 8 on the next, and so on - which makes rehearsal talk much easier: bar 19 means the same thing to everyone holding the sheet. Eight systems is the default, giving thirty-two bars a page, with six and ten available for bigger handwriting or denser charts. Along the top there are printed rules for the song, the key and the tempo.

Everything is measured from the page rectangle, so the systems are spread evenly down the sheet in both US Letter and A4 and the staves run the full width with equal margins. It is paper to print and write on in pencil, not a form to type into. Print a handful before a writing session, or merge several into one file with pdfty's Merge PDF tool for a longer arrangement.