Hal Leonard Play Along Series

A Practical Guide to the Hal Leonard Play Along Series

The Hal Leonard Play Along Series is a set of method books that come with accompanying audio tracks. You get a songbook full of lead sheets, chord charts, and performance notes, plus recordings that play the rhythm section while you play the melody or improvise over the changes. They cover a wide range of instruments and genres — jazz, rock, blues, pop, classical, and folk titles are all available. Each book is aimed at an intermediate level, usually somewhere between early college coursework and serious self-taught players. Here is how I actually use them in practice. I buy the book, open it to a tune, and pull up the audio — either the app, YouTube, or the embedded QR code, depending on the edition. The track starts, the rhythm section comes in, and I play through the chart. That is the whole model. It sounds simple, which is partly why people buy them, but there are a few real details that matter once you dig in. The recordings are the main variable. Earlier editions from the 90s and early 2000s have a distinctly dated, almost corporate jazz-fusion sound. The drum machines are obvious, the bass lines are generic, and the piano or guitar voicings lean heavily on standard comping patterns. The newer releases tend to use session musicians, so the tracks feel more human and less mechanical. If you are buying a used copy, check the publication year before you commit. A 1998 blues book is not the same listening experience as a 2021 one.

The audio does not change key. That is intentional and by design. The book gives you transposed parts for Bb instruments, Eb instruments, and C instruments, but the track stays in one fixed key. If the book is in E and you are a tenor sax player, you play the Bb sax chart while the band plays in E. You learn to read in your transposed part and match the pitch. This is standard practice for play-along books, and it is worth understanding upfront because it catches a lot of people off guard the first time. Tempo is another area where things get tricky. The metronome markings on the page are sometimes optimistic. I worked through the Hal Leonard Play Along Series Blues Guitar book a while back and the tempo on the title track felt noticeably faster in the recording than the printed quarter-note value suggested. The drummer was pushing into the upbeat, and the bass player was riding the grid differently than the chart implied. I just slowed the track down in the app and practiced at 70% speed until I could lock in, then gradually brought it back up. Most apps let you adjust playback speed without changing pitch, and that feature is essential here. I ran into a more specific edge case with one of the jazz piano books. The play-along track had a drum fill that led into a new section, but the fill was four bars long and did not line up cleanly with the first downbeat of the next chorus. I kept losing my place because my internal counting did not match the track. The workaround was to mark the chart at the bottom of each page with the actual bar number where each section started, relative to the recording, not the printed page. Once I mapped it out, the confusion went away. It is a small thing, but the books are not written for the recordings — they are written as standalone charts, and the recordings are an afterthought in most cases.

The app that ships with most recent editions is functional but bare-bones. It lets you loop sections, adjust tempo, and select individual tracks in some cases, but the UI is not polished. I have had it crash mid-loop during a practice session, which is annoying when you are trying to drill a difficult passage. The standalone YouTube uploads are often more reliable, though you lose the looping and tempo controls. Pick whichever works better for your workflow. One counter-intuitive thing about these books: they are not as useful for pure sight-reading as they are for building a personal repertoire. The charts are accurate, but they are thin. There is no bass line written out in most titles, no drum notation, no keyboard voicings — just melody, chords, and lyrics. If you are a pianist trying to learn how to comp in a certain style, this book will not teach you that. It expects you to already know how to voice the chords and create your own accompaniment. The value is in having a reliable chart and a band to play with, not in learning the harmony from scratch. Another thing people miss is the distinction between the Play Along Series and the Hal Leonard Artist Concepts books. Artist Concepts includes full transcriptions of soloists and more detailed arrangement notes. Play Along books are strictly lead sheets with tracks. If you want to learn what a specific musician played on a recording, go to Artist Concepts. If you just want a backing track to improvise over, Play Along is the right choice. Mixing them up wastes money and time.

Limitations are worth being honest about. The track selection is often curated by the publisher, not by you. Some tunes are great, some are filler. The jazz titles tend to overuse the same standard progression — ii-V-I variations that get repetitive fast. The blues books sometimes include the same 12-bar forms in slightly different keys without adding much harmonic variation. If you are grinding through one of these for weeks, the repetition can feel monotonous. I found myself skipping half the tracks in a couple of the older volumes and focusing only on the ones that matched songs I actually wanted to perform. There is also the issue of audio isolation. Some newer editions offer separate tracks for drums, bass, and chords, but most do not. You cannot mute the piano part if you are playing piano and want to practice soloing over just the rhythm section. That means you are stuck with the full mix, which can make it hard to hear your own instrument clearly if your monitoring setup is weak. A decent pair of headphones helps, but it does not solve the fundamental problem. For what it is, the series is solid. It is not a comprehensive theory course, and it is not a replacement for playing with real musicians. But it is one of the most accessible ways to practice improvisation and ensemble playing on your own schedule. The books are widely available through most music retailers, and the audio is free once you have the book. You do not need a subscription or a separate purchase for the tracks in most cases.

If you are looking to get started, pick a book in a style you actually play, not one you think you should play. The difference between using it consistently and letting it collect dust is usually genre interest, not difficulty level. Download the app, try one tune at a slow tempo, and see if the tracks feel usable to you. If they do, you have a legitimate practice tool. If they feel too sterile or too generic, there are alternatives like Real Drum or iReal Pro that give you more control over the backing tracks, though they require more setup and do not come with curated print materials.