Seven months ago, I created and published my Real Book Rankings Index, a single-page, color-coded guide to the most popular tunes in the Sixth Edition Real Book. I've had it taped to the inside front cover of my Real Book, and I use it every time I'm looking for a tune to call at a jam session or learn on my own. It's been immensely helpful and has fascinated several of my musician friends with its utility.

After an encouraging comment on my original post, I decided to finish what I started and assemble similar indexes for Volume II and Volume III. Today, I present to you the Volume II index:

Download the PDF.

The columns and color-coding are identical to the first volume. "Page" is the page number in the Hal Leonard Real Book, Volume II, Second Edition. "Rank" is the tune's rank in the song list on JazzStandards.com. (They conducted a giant study of thousands of jazz recordings, and ranked the top 1000 songs by how often each has been recorded.) The colors are just an easy way of visualizing the rank: red represents top 100, blue is 101-250, yellow is 251-500, and white is 501-1000.

For best results, print it out, cut off the margins, and tape or paste it to the inside front cover of your Real Book. (You can nearly forget about the standard table of contents; I never use mine anymore.) I only ask that you leave "fromthewoodshed.com" visible at the bottom so that your friends know where it came from when you show it off. And if you find it helpful, please tell some people about it. Recommendations through Twitter, Facebook, your own blog, or literal word of mouth would all be much appreciated. Show it to your students or your teacher, or take it to some jam sessions.

Volume III is coming soon, and I'll eventually get to work on the Chuck Sher New Real Books.