Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Sheet Music, anyone?

Some time ago, I blogged about a booklet of Christmas carol lyrics that we had put together. We thought we had the music to all the songs in the booklet. But as we were double checking we noticed four songs that we didn't have. Checking with the accompanist that will be playing them for our Christmas party, we reduced that to one but several further inquiries didn't find that one. However, it did put us on the trail of something that is potentially much more useful - a website that sells sheet music.

MusicNotes.com
claims to offer 80,000 songs, 260,000 music books, and over 1 million customers. I have no way of knowing if that is accurate but from brief experience, I can say that they have a great depth of offerings and at least 1 new happy customer.

The experience is about as simple as printing out a letter or searching online for a recipe. Simply enter a title, composer, or lyricist for a song and you will be presented with all the songs and music books that have that title, composer, or lyricist. We were looking for "Winter Wonderland" and found 15 "hits" including a "lead sheet" (melody and lyrics only) for $1.95 and a collection of Christmas songs for $14.95. The rest were sheet music at $4.95 each. Some of the arrangements were more difficult, some had guitar fingering, some included the longer intro to the song while others didn't, some were accompaniment only (piano solo with this kind wouldn't work well).

After checking through our choices and finding the best one for us, we were prepared to check out when we noticed a little box at the bottom asking if we wanted to transpose the piece. We decided that it would be easier to sing and to play in the key of C. Click, click, and we had a new Winter Wonderland in the key of C.

Paying was as easy as typing in my credit card number. I was then presented with a button and instructions to make sure the printer was on and loaded with paper. Seconds later, I had my very own personalized (they don't want me making 100 copies) copy of Winter Wonderland.

Now I'm trying to think of all the other music I've wanted to buy over the years.

1 comment:

  1. I've used them or someone like them once before. They also had an option to download a midi file so you could have the computer play it for you.

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