Professional musicians often play from “lead sheets”, and I’ve noticed that most amateurs don’t quite understand what a lead sheet it, so I thought I would briefly define it.

A lead sheet is a piece of music that contains only the melody (tune of the song) and the chord symbols that go with it (and sometimes the lyrics). Musicians read the melody while taking their clues from the chord symbols. Let’s say the song starts on a “C” and the chord symbols above it is Fm7. That means that the musician would play the Fm7 chord with C as the top note of the chord. For an example of what a lead sheet looks like, please go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet

Collections of songs in lead sheet formats are found in “fake books” available in music stores.