September 23, 2024
Hal Leonard: Meet the Makers
Inside the history and industry-defining innovations of the world’s premier sheet-music publisher.
Each and every Friday, at 12 a.m. Eastern time, thousands of new songs hit streaming platforms, pushing popular music forward and offering a new crop of contenders for Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
The staff at Hal Leonard—the world’s foremost publisher of sheet music, with an international network of offices stretching from Milwaukee to Milan—start digging into new music. They forecast which new songs have hit potential, as well as which ones seem suited to a piano/vocal arrangement.
After songs have been chosen, Hal Leonard editors tap into their trusted global network of professional music transcribers; in instances where the score is needed immediately, the job will go to a transcriber based in Australia or another overseas location where it isn’t the middle of the night. Following a stringent editorial review, accurate piano/vocal arrangements go live digitally on the same day songs appear on Spotify. And as these new songs undergo their life cycle, hopefully becoming smash hits, the editors think about other music educators and customers who might have more specific arrangement needs: Concert band? Marching band? Choir? Complete guitar tab? The options are myriad.
Today, nearly 80 years since its founding, Hal Leonard leads its market in a way few companies in or outside the music industry could ever dream of. As any musician who has ever searched for a particular folio or arrangement knows, most roads in sheet music, songbooks and method books lead to Hal Leonard, or to one of the imprints it distributes. The key to the company’s success, it turns out, is that its focus and mission haven’t changed since Hal Leonard formed officially in 1947.
Harold “Hal” Edstrom, Everett Leonard “Ev” Edstrom and Roger Busdicker (from left). Images Courtesy of Hal Leonard.
Was Hal Leonard a Person?
Indeed. Or, to be more precise, two brothers. The company’s roots reach back to three Minnesota-based musicians—Harold “Hal” Edstrom; his brother Everett Leonard “Ev” Edstrom; and pal Roger Busdicker—who formed the Hal Leonard Band, a “dance band,” during the swing era. Dance bands were big bands whose sole purpose was to entertain dancers, and to keep the crowds happy, they had to continually update their repertoire with popular songs that resonated with audiences through radio, movies and Broadway.
By the late 1940s, the founding trio had moved on to other musical pursuits. Everett, who became known throughout the region as Hal Leonard because he was the bandleader, entered instrument retail as proprietor of the Hal Leonard Music store. Hal and Roger became educators, directing bands in ambitious high-school music programs. To generate more interest from their students, they put the arranging and transcription skills they picked up in the dance band to use. Their school-band arrangements of popular tunes of the day, duplicated by mimeograph without licensing, proved a hot commodity.
But in order to expand and legitimize their business, they needed to start acquiring the copyrights to the songs they arranged. They decided to go straight to the source, New York City’s Tin Pan Alley, where a system of composers, arrangers and music publishers churned out new music to feed the public imagination. Their pilgrimage yielded the rights to a hit, “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” a brokenhearted ballad from 1909 that gained a second wind in 1947, when it became the theme to a musical film of the same name.
From there, a kind of winning formula was set: accurate, legal transcriptions of the music that aspiring musicians want to learn. And this concept became the launch pad for countless other concepts and formats that Hal Leonard has explored, all in the name of providing musicians with the best possible resources for their education.
The Secret to Hal Leonard’s Success? Networking
To try and understand why Hal Leonard is such a force is to discover eight decades of relationship-building throughout all the various facets of the music business. To start, Hal Leonard is a licensee with strong bonds to seemingly every important entertainment and publishing organization out there, from Disney to Sony, Universal Music and more. This allows the company to quickly and smoothly roll out folios and single-song arrangements dedicated to Taylor Swift (Hal Leonard’s current top seller), Billie Eilish and countless other icons of pop culture.
This immediate access to copyright allows Hal Leonard to move with rare quickness—e.g., those day-of-release transcriptions—and gives the company’s method books a unique edge: Where competitors can only advertise lessons “in the style of” your favorite players, Hal Leonard can deliver the recorded licks and riffs musicians genuinely want to learn.
Through its in-house staff and its vast Rolodex of transcribers, arrangers and clinicians, Hal Leonard is a musician-fueled company. Editorial staffers must be experienced music readers and music-theory aces, and many of them have focused expertise in a helpful area, whether that be musical theater or choral arranging or drums and percussion.
These full-time staff members further long-running relationships with some of the finest clinicians currently at work. Take, for example, blues guitar: Musicians who choose Hal Leonard will be working from instructional materials assembled by master educators like Wolf Marshall, Greg Koch or Dave Rubin. All of these artists satisfy Hal Leonard’s criteria for contributors, which boils down to: Are they deeply respected in their field? Have they developed a methodology that works—one that is clear, logical and effective? Are they skilled, fluid writers, in addition to being great musicians? For clinicians, playing well is only half the battle; an equally crucial element is being able to convey instruction in direct and digestible language.
Hal Leonard has also developed a community of private educators and band, choir and orchestra directors who offer feedback throughout the year, at conferences, clinics and other events. This affords teachers the opportunity to make suggestions on pedagogy as well as what music will better inspire today’s students to want to learn. Face-to-face conversation is a huge asset, since analytics alone cannot reveal the musical trends that will excite young musicians—whether that means string-instrument folios for Taylor Swift’s greatest hits, or concert-band arrangements of recent video-game themes.
The Hal Leonard Orchestra c. 1936. Image Courtesy of Hal Leonard.
Any Song, Any Lesson, Any Format
While Hal Leonard made its name in printed music, and it remains dedicated to print publishing, the company has also been a pioneer in technology-driven learning solutions. Hal Leonard innovated the pairing of written instruction with audio in 1970, and a half-century later, recording professional musicians to illustrate lessons and arrangements and provide play-along tracks remains a top priority.
By launching resources like SheetMusicDirect.com and, a decade later, GuitarInstructor.com, the company anticipated our current era of online instruction as early as the mid-’90s. Today, it’s more accurate to think of Hal Leonard as a leader in educational resources across formats. Here are some of our favorite products showcasing the nonstop ingenuity of Hal Leonard.
For music teachers and youth band and orchestra directors, the Essential Elements logo is as familiar as valve oil and rosin. Available for all concert-band and orchestra instruments, Essential Elements introduced revelatory new ideas into the school-band pedagogy. Over the past 30 years, music educators have responded by making Essential Elements the best-selling band-and-orchestra method out there. Here are just a few of Essential Elements’ breakthroughs:
Teaching together and apart: As any professional musician knows, those hours spent alone in the practice room are crucial, but they can’t replace the lessons that occur in collaborative performance. Essential Elements includes exercises and pieces to be played in sections and ensembles as well as solo, mirroring the band experience.
Complete musicians, complete people: Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Like the series’ lucid descriptions of musical technique, Essential Elements books seamlessly incorporate musical and cultural history. From the blues to Beethoven to timeless folk songs, Essential Elements illuminates its lessons with helpful annotations.
Teaching the teachers: Plenty of methods have interactive online components, but Essential Elements Interactive takes the concept to another level. For educators, the online features will transform how they teach. The EEi Music Studio is packed with professional demonstrations, HD video lessons and practice tools students can easily access. Video assignments allow teachers to review progress on the go, and an interactive calendar and communication tools help with the bear of scheduling. There’s simply too much to mention in this limited space—Essential Elements Interactive is more a fully developed app than a supplement.
Rhythm training, out of the gate: Melody rules the roost in early music education. But what about rhythm? The exercises in Essential Elements build young musicians’ sense of rhythm and time feel while also teaching them notes and fundamental technique.
For working jazz musicians of a certain age, the phrase Real Book surely brings back funny memories of a hushed request at your local music shop. Developed at the Berklee College of Music in the mid-’70s, the Real Book became a highly sought-after resource, compiling barebones “lead sheets” for the standard jazz repertoire. It was duplicated and sold on the black market for decades; if your local independent music store didn’t carry it, then your lessons teacher could probably score you a copy. The Real Book was a godsend that carried countless players through unfamiliar tunes during cocktail-hour gigs, but it was also illegal, riddled with errors and sometimes illegible. Enter Hal Leonard.
The company competed with the Real Book for many years using various “fake book” series, ultimately to no avail; the Real Book was an institution, and a rite of passage. But in the early 2000s, a simple but game-changing idea took hold: Why not simply make the Real Book a Hal Leonard publication? After all, no one owned the Real Book, and for decades its bootleg status ensured that none of the featured composers received a dime. So Hal Leonard set to legitimizing this jazz staple—correcting errors, making deals with the composers or their estates, and locating a copyist who could pull off a clean, exacting reproduction of the original Real Book’s iconic handwriting. The cover would appear the same, without even the addition of a Hal Leonard logo. The end result—which could now be comfortably and affordably purchased—became a bestseller.
Hal Leonard’s current Real Book program is a powerhouse. In addition to many volumes dedicated to jazz, the series includes books covering R&B, country and other genres; must-learn jazz solos; individual composers like guitar great Pat Metheny (who authored his book); and much more.
Simply put, Hal Leonard owns the guitar-instruction space, starting with their definitive guitar methods. It seems no style, artist or technique has gone uncovered in the Hal Leonard catalog, and by offering many different series, the company provides players of all skill levels a path to learning their favorite music. Publications in the Easy Guitar series arrange classic songs with a focus on chords as well as streamlined riffs and melodies—ideal for beginning students and singer-songwriter performance. For advanced players, series such as Signature Licks pair accurate transcriptions of essential tracks with technical and theoretical guidance.
But perhaps no other series in the guitar-transcription field holds more meaning than Guitar Recorded Versions. Boasting note-for-note transcriptions of tracks as recorded by the artist, the series launched in the late ’80s but came into its own in the following decade. After the company established its first full-time guitar editors in the mid-’90s, Hal Leonard firmed up its industry-leading standards in transcription as well as its stable of all-star transcribers. Today, the triangular Guitar Recorded Versions logo stands as an emblem of the care and integrity that goes into all Hal Leonard publications.
And So Much More…
Note that these picks can’t begin to cover the breadth of Hal Leonard’s output. Vocalists with lead-role ambitions need to check out The Singer’s Musical Theatre Anthology series, the go-to audition resource for all voices and Broadway eras. We’re also impartial to the Complete Scores series: beautiful slipcase editions containing the complete works of legendary artists like Jimi Hendrix, with guitar and bass parts in standard notation and tab. The First 50 Songs lineup offers a carefully curated survey of pieces to keep beginners striving. And on it goes, all painstakingly transcribed and edited for your learning pleasure.
