I’ve been playing piano over 45 years now, it’s definitely a favorite hobby of mine and I’m lucky I own a piano. Time was I’d just go to the local music store and purchase new sheet music but it’s now the 21st Century and apparently that’s no longer how it’s done.
So, fine - I’m willing to buy on line but I’d like opinions and advice about this.
Caveat: so far I’ve heard a lot about iPads and e-sheet music. I do not own an iPad. I can not afford an iPad. And I just don’t see how I’d be able to view sheet music adequately on my Kindle or Nexus 7. The computer is not in the music room. The piano is not in the computer room. Those two facts are not going to change any time soon. Bottom line: I need to be able to print out the music on paper.
With that in mind - any recommendations? Anything to stay away from?
What kind of music do you want to play? If you google “free piano sheet music” you’ll be inundated. Also, if you have a local university, their library may have a music collection which you can copy from.
I play everything from classical to ragtime to various pop/rock/country/show tunes from about WWII through the present day. At this point I’m pretty eclectic.
When possible, I prefer “original” scores and not dumbed-down “easy piano solo” types of arrangements. I do have to sometimes alter compositions - Scott Joplin, for example, had MUCH larger hands and greater reach than I do - but only when it is absolutely necessary. I’ve also occasionally composed my own chords/arrangements but I’m not terribly good at it and for that reason I’m not fond of “cheat books” and the like.
About the only thing I’m not interested in is jazz, which I know is heresy to some people but the vast majority of jazz simply does not appeal to me (to the despair of my sister and her husband - she used to be a professional jazz musician and the BIL plays a few jazz standards that appeal even to me, but in the interests of family harmony we’ve agreed to disagree and stick to what we all enjoy when we get together. They don’t push jazz on me and I leave the bagpipes at home.)
Not too keen on most hip-hop/rap, either, but given a lot of that is carried by the lyrics/spoken word and beat-boxing type sounds I’m not convinced it translates to piano well. I can appreciate it when well done, but it’s not my genre when it comes to performing.
I frequently buy music from an online sheet music seller - the site I use comes up on the first page when googling “buy online sheet music”, although there are several sites that offer this service.
Generally, the way it works seems to be that one buys a piece of music - I usually buy individual songs - and one can then view the sheet music as many times as one likes using the site’s viewer, which is a small program installed on one’s computer or device. One can also print out the sheet music, but only once.
I find this to be a really convenient way of buying sheet music. The first page of each piece of music is free to view, so one can play the first part of a piece and see if one likes the arrangement before purchasing. Often there can be multiple different arrangements of the same piece of music, collected from different sources. This is great for finding an arrangement to suit one’s experience level and also, more simply, some arrangements are sweeter than others.
The viewer program also has some additional features for some, but not all, pieces of music. Firstly, it can play the sheet music, using the computer’s MIDI sound set, so one can actually hear the arrangement, which is obviously a great help in learning and understanding it. Also, one can change the tempo, mute the left or right hand or transpose the piece to another key.
Additionally, this site has a lot of public domain classical sheet music: IMSLP.org
I’ve gotten lots of sheet music for classical guitar online. Occasionally I’ll pick a little in front of the computer screen to see how it sounds but mainly I just print it out – most comes as PDF.
Tablets and ereaders aren’t really big enough for sheet music. There are some 8 1/2 x 11 inch devices available but they are very expensive and still only display one page at a time.
Any library system worth their salt should have sheet music somewhere. The main branch of our county library even had selections form Gilbert & Sullivan and Wagner for piano at one time.
My wife and I do a piano/bass combo at church and are regular consumers of sheet music of all forms.
She prefers the traditional approach, while I prefer the iPad approach. Both are equally valid these days, and pianists are probably not about to let physical sheet music go away any time soon, so you ought to be able to find plenty.
The aforementioned online sheet music sites work nicely for us, and we often buy new arrangements for a few dollars.
Those sites are a bit of a mixed blessing since they allow you to print their music one single time. If you want to reprint, you either need to pay again (a lower reprint fee) or ask them very nicely, asserting that the original print was destroyed.
They do not permit photocopying, but that is the same with any sheet music.
I highly recommend the digital sheet music online sites.
On the more traditional front, sheet music books are still a thriving industry. I recently purchased a few gospel and spirituals collections from Amazon.
If there is a genre you like, and you want to have more bang for your buck, check out what Amazon has to offer.
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This is a tangent since the OP specifically excluded iPads and the like, but I’ll give my two cents…
I use the regular sized iPad Pro with Forscore as my music app and the Apple Pencil to make all of my scribbles all over the pages. The reason is that I need to write the chords and/or any other stuff for my basslines on the piano score my wife is using.
I use an Airturn pedal (the one with Boss pedals) to turn pages.
The screen size really isn’t much of a factor, but the fact that you see only one page at a time is a bit of a challenge since we are used to seeing two pages side by side. I have to scribble cheat notes of the upcoming measure for each page turn.
For classical guitar, I highly recommend trying out this setup. I love having thousands of pages of sheet music in my hand.
Of course, there is always the chance of disaster: two weeks ago we were in the middle of a piece at church when I turned a page and suddenly all of my annotations disappeared–it was a bug and the app just needed to be restarted. Bad news in the middle of a performance.
Treeware isn’t perfect either–last week she turned the page and found one sheet missing for still-unexplained reasons.
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I have used a site like that and can sympathize with what they are trying to do, but I think the print limitation is misguided and does not recognize the world we live in today. The paper I print things on at home is not the same quality as the sheet music I bought 35 years ago and still have. And my ink is water soluble. If some drunk (or me) spills a drink on my printed sheet, the ink will run and become unreadable. On old sheet music you’re just going to get a stain. I thought I could work around this by printing to a PDF driver but the site seems to be able to recognize that and didn’t allow it. So I print a clean copy and scan it just in case I ever need to re-print it to replace a damaged copy.
I don’t buy “real” sheet music very often anymore, but I’ve gotten some from Amazon. I’m also lucky enough to live where there are Music & Arts stores, and sometimes I’ll go in and browse the sheet music.
Couldn’t agree more. I understand what they are doing, but they are making life difficult for their honest customers. A private PDF is simply a backup copy. And the built-in OS X pdf generation from the print dialog works dandy.