I love music. I play viola at a semi-professional level, and violin when necessary. I played piano enough to make it through a music major and then got out of practice in graduate school without a piano. For the last few years, I've been enjoying our inherited piano and gradually increasing my piano skills.
With these interests, as you can imagine, I'm always interested in finding inexpensive ways to get music to play.
Many libraries, especially at colleges and universities, offer sheet music. If you are just using it for home use or educational purposes, I'm pretty sure it's ok to copy it. (I should probably know the right answer to this, but I confess, I don't.)
I've recently been exploring another option for free sheet music - websites that offer it for download. If you do a search for free sheet music, you will get some truly free stuff and many places that are mostly advertising. Here are two that I have found useful:
A few words of advice - many of these downloads are images of printed music, which I assume is out of copyright. Others are arrangements made by other people. Like all arrangements, the quality varies a lot. I feel most confident about the quality of the printed music. There may be simplified arrangements that could be great for beginners. Just pay attention and figure out whether what you are looking at really suits your needs.
While I use these resources for my own fun and education, this could be a great resource for homeschoolers too. Let me know if you have any other good sources to share.
For more frugal ideas, head over to Biblical Womanhood.
2 comments:
I print music out from the Internet too. I'm like you, I don't think there is a problem with it.
If you like this type of music, they have sheet music at: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/ and http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/
This is historic sheet music from the 19th and 20th centuries. I have printed some out and they are sometimes slightly fuzzy, but you can read them. I've had a lot of fun with them.
The cover scans are excellent and I printed some of the covers off to decorate my baby's room.
There are tons of online resources for sheet music, particularly for pianists. If it's not free, more often than not it's really really affordable, especially when compared to paper counterparts.
My favorite site for inexpensive sheet music is www.EveryNote.com. If you want to explore some other resources, you should check out the ongoing discussions over at the PianoWorld forums (http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/topic/2/10381/6.html#000151) You'll find a lot of terrific listings for other online sheet music repositories, most of them free!
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