Six pages from a school band book
A ring binder, six photocopied trombone parts, Beethoven next to the Avengers, and not one recording of the part itself.
This is a trombone part book from a Swedish school band. It lives in a black ring binder, it has been in and out of a bag a few hundred times, and we photographed six pages of it with a phone, the way a student would. Here is what it carries.
Film music first
The front page is The Avengers, Part 4, marked Trombone/Baritone/Bassoon. Bass clef, two flats, eight bars of off-beat quavers before the first accent. It is a photocopy of a bought arrangement; the stamp at the bottom says six copies were sold to a customer in August 2025. The holes are punched slightly off-centre so the rings lift the left edge.
Two pages on is All I Want for Christmas Is You, Part 4 again. Long tied whole notes for the first 20 bars, then a Fast Swing and a page of accented crotchets. The page is wavy enough that the staves bend in the photo.
Then Beethoven
In the same binder, on the same kind of paper, is the Allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, also Part 4. Two-four time, three flats, and from bar 75 onwards nothing but triplets. Someone has pencilled slide positions and a few circled reminders above the hard bars, which is exactly what you do when there is no recording of your part to check against.
Next to it, a Chorale by Paul Cook: 28 bars of minims and crotchets in Andante, with breath marks. It is the simplest page in the book and the one the band probably plays at the start of every rehearsal.
A Swedish tune with a car on it
Macken is a Swedish tune, and this page is plainly from a method book for beginners: a cartoon car with its bonnet up, a Swing marking, eight easy systems, and “Sida 8 av 12” at the bottom. The part is simply labelled Trombon. The paper is thinner than the rest and the rings sit on the right, so this page curls the other way.
And then Pirates of the Caribbean, the one everybody asks for. It is not in the binder at all; it is a loose sheet, photographed flat on a table with the shadow of the phone across the middle. No part label you can read, no dynamics, 77 bars of bass-clef quavers.
What none of them come with
Every one of these pages has a YouTube or MP3 link for the full band recording, or no link at all. None of them comes with a recording of Part 4. A young trombonist takes this binder home and has to work out what the fourth part sounds like alone, from the dots, with nothing to play along to.
That is the page Sheetly is for. Photograph it, the notes get read on our servers, and the part plays back on a trombone, or a piano, at whatever tempo is comfortable, with one bar on loop if bar 75 of the Beethoven is giving trouble. Record a take against it. Ask the coach what the slide positions are in bars 21 to 24. The binder stays exactly as crumpled as it is.
Hear your own part.
Photograph a page from your binder and play it back on your instrument.
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Written by Love Ranmar, who makes Sheetly. hello@trysheetly.comQuestions
Can Sheetly scan a whole band book?
Page by page, yes. Photograph each part you want to hear, or import a multi-page PDF. The six pages here took a few minutes end to end. Each page becomes a score in your library that plays.
Does scanning work on photocopies?
Yes. Every page in this book is a photocopy in a ring binder, stamps, creases and shadows included, photographed with a phone. How accurate the reading is on photographs is measured openly in the benchmark.
Do I need to take the pages out of the binder?
No. These were shot in the binder with the rings in frame. What matters is that the staff lines are visible and the light is even; the scanner reads around the rest.